Category Archives: Plant breeding

Seed list for 2022

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With the addition of these Chinese quince seeds, that’s the list of the seeds that I have available for sowing in 2022 pretty much complete. Many forest garden seeds need stratification (winter cold). This seems to be in plentiful supply at present, but sowing of these seeds – unless it’s in the fridge – shouldn’t be put off for too much longer.

I now add seeds to the list as they become available, so it’s worth checking back every now and again. I’ve been experimenting with sending out roots and cuttings lately and have added more of these to the list. Unfortunately, for plant health reasons, I can only send these within the UK. As usual, everything is offered on a gift economy basis: this does not mean that they are free, but you can pay, swap or pay forward according to your means.

The full list is at www.foodforest.garden/forest-garden-seeds

Seed list 2019/20

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That’s pretty much all the seeds I have added to my online seed list now. This is a good time for sowing seeds that need stratification (winter cold) before germination, which in the forest garden is a lot of them.
New seeds this year include angelica, Manchurian spikenard (a continental version of udo), common storksbill, spignel, evening primrose, orpine, fen nettle and Scottish-grown chamnamul (Pimpinella brachycarpa). As usual they are offered for swaps, donations or the love of plants.
One new thing I have done this year is add codes to the plant listings which should save me spending ages hunting for them. Please quote Latin names with the code. The list is at https://foodforest.garden/forest-garden-seeds/

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Common storksbill, Erodium cicutarium

Hardy celery

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Some plants in the forest garden are just more easy to photograph than others. Aralia spinosa spreads its delicate leaflets in one easy-to-focus plane, while pot marigold works the camera shamelessly. Celery is at the other end of the spectrum. Its sprawling habit makes it hard to get into a single coherent photo, while the fact that it puts on most of its leaf growth in autumn, winter and early spring means that the photography conditions usually consist of low light and wet, difficult-to-focus leaves.
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Those of us who don’t show up so well in photographs, however, can still have lots of other excellent qualities, and celery is an indispensable member of the forest garden cast. That growing season means that celery leaves are available when few others are and its flavour is a welcome addition to winter soups and stews. As with most carrot family plants, it’s the young, tender leaf shoots that are best rather than older leaves. In summer the young flower stems can also be used in dishes like stir fry and the seeds, produced in abundance, make a wonderful aromatic spice.
No matter how useful I find celery at present, I think I have only started to explore its potential as a forest garden plant. The celery I’m talking about is not the familiar shop-bought celery with its large, white, crunchy stems. That can be grown in Scotland, but only with lots of care, watering, feeding and mounding, and preferably a polytunnel. I’m talking about the smaller, leafier varieties variously called wild, herb, leaf, cutting or Chinese celery, which are used more as a leafy herb than as a stem vegetable.
Despite their differences, all these varieties are the same species, Apium graveolens. While the chunkier stem celery was clearly developed far south of Scotland, there’s no reason why a bit of selective breeding couldn’t favour the same qualities within a hardier gene pool, more adapted to a forest garden in the North. That’s what I’m working on in my garden, and celery is already responding.
The first step was to source a wide range of genetic sources. This involved navigating a bit of a minefield of names. True wild celery is Apium graveolens var. graveolens or ‘smallage’. It is a plant of wet, salty ground. Seed sold as wild celery is usually probably not true wild celery but one of the leafy cultivated celeries collectively labelled Apium graveolens var. secalinum, as opposed to the thick-stemmed var. dulce. One group of these are the Chinese celeries, also known as kintsai (which is just an old spelling of the Chinese word for celery, qíncài or 芹菜) or Nan Ling celery. Chinese celeries have generally undergone more selection than their Western counterparts. They tend to be more delicate and more colourful, and not quite so hardy. Western secalinum are called herb, leaf or cutting celery. There’s also a Dutch heirloom variety usually marketed as ‘Par-cel’ or occasionally ‘Zwolche Krul’. It’s a dead ringer for curly-leaved parsely – hence the name – and there’s a lot of confusion on the internet as to which it really is.


Having sown a range of these different kinds, I left them to it for a few years to mix up the gene pool. Celery is biennial so there is a new generation every couple of years. Now everything is well mixed, I’m starting to apply some selection pressures. There are a few qualities that I’m selecting for. Size and vigour are important of course. For stem qualities I’m looking for thickness and solidity. Some stems are hollow while others are fleshy all the way through. A few plants seem to have a degree of perenniality, surviving and growing again after flowering. Hardiness and general adaptation to my garden conditions are selected for by the environment.
You can see some of the variation here, in the range of leaf lengths, thicknesses, colours and solidity. No prizes for guessing which is my favourite one so far.
_MG_6365celery comparison
I haven’t tried selecting for a thickened hypocotl or stem base yet, but that would be the route to an equivalent of celeriac, the bulbous Apium graveolens var. rapaceum.
Although celery is ancestrally a marsh plant mine seem happy in all parts of the garden, including in a moderate amount of shade. In contrast to the traditional celery it needs next to no special care.

Turnip-rooted chervil

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I was being a bit of a pig in the allotment recently. Wild boar are one species that definitely didn’t get the memo about no-dig gardening. They have worked out one essential fact about the winter forest: the ground is where all the good stuff is. Their rootling behaviour – essentially ploughing up the ground looking for hidden bounty – looks destructive, and in some ways it is. Where densities are high they can cause an 80-95% reduction in herbaceous cover and the local extinction of some species. In other ways, their activity aids the health of the forest. Like any sensible pig, they prefer to target abundant species where they can be sure that all that work will be rewarded (you try digging up the earth with your nose, after all). As such they preferentially target plants with imperialistic tendencies, such as bracken and willowherb rhizomes or carpeting bulbs such as bluebells. This knocks back these aggressive spreaders, making space for a greater variety of species, and a number of studies have shown that over the long term species diversity is higher in areas with wild boar than in those without.
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Similarly, in the forest garden, there are some crops where a good rootle is the only way to harvest them at some times of year, and the resulting soil disturbance helps to make room for a range of self-seeding species that tend to get crowded out in entirely undisturbed, perennial communities.
One of these is turnip-rooted chervil, or plain root chervil (Chaerophyllum bulbosum), a biennial root vegetable in the carrot family. If you’ve never heard of it, that’s probably because it has a few oddities in its life cycle which mean that it has never been cultivated widely. The first of these is that the seed needs stratification (winter cold) in order to germinate, and loses its viability very quickly in dry conditions (like seed packets). This means that fresh seed needs to be collected every year and sown very soon after, in the autumn. This makes growing it in rows in a crop rotation quite awkward. One option is to simply allow it to self-seed around the garden, which it does very readily and which eliminates all the worries about sowing and stratifying.
The second problem is that it sprouts early and dies back early, generally at the first hint of dryness. When it dies back it does so without leaving a trace of where it is. This isn’t a problem in labelled rows, but definitely is when the roots have planted themselves randomly around the place. It isn’t helped by the fact that many people reckon the the flavour of new roots is poor compared to ones that have sat in the ground for a few months in cold conditions.
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All this leads to two main strategies for growing root chervil. The first is to sow it in annual beds in autumn, well marked and labelled. It starts to germinate here in early March, well before most crops. It then dies down by June, giving room for another crop, perhaps something like oriental greens which benefit from a late sowing so as not to run straight to seed. Finally it can be harvested over the winter. Some gardeners report problems with rodents getting at the stored roots, in which case a month in the fridge is also enough to improve the flavour. I find that chervil roots have a starchy, chestnut-like flavour that I enjoy a lot.
The other option is to let the plants take care of the sowing themselves, but this means that you are likely to have very little idea of where exactly they are by the time you want them. Until, that is, the roots have to give themselves away in order to grow for the new season. This is when you can harvest a great delicacy. A quick rootle will give you a pile of roots with young growth attached. There is no need to separate these as both parts are edible, just wash them well. By this time the flavour of the root has changed completely. The starch has been broken down into sugars, mobilised for growth, and the taste is now somewhat carroty and very sweet. It is impossible to get them out without a degree of soil disturbance, but, as the wild boar demonstrate, that is not entirely a bad thing in the forest garden.
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Whenever you dig them up, it is worth keeping the best roots to transplant to another bed for seed production. The roots show a lot of variability, in size, length and form. The default seems to be a round shape, presumably explaining the ‘turnip-rooted’ part of the name, but a proportion have an elongated, carrot-like shape which seems to be associated with higher yields. Given that you are likely to have to maintain your own seed line if you want to grow this vegetable at all, you might as well take the opportunity to improve the stock and adapt it to your own conditions as you go.

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Sprouting roots with the best separated out for replanting


I am always astonished at what a vigorous shoot comes out of a little chervil root. From a root usually no more than a few centimetres long they throw up seed stems over three metres tall. These can be very dense and with little leaf, so most of the nutrients required must be coming out from the root. This matches with the starchy flavour and a dry weight that is about 40% of it’s fresh weight. Chervil roots are clearly very dense nutrient stores. As such they could be seen as contributing to nutrient storage in the system as a whole. I am never too worried about surplus chervil roots that pop up and run to seed in unexpected areas of the garden: they are easily pulled out and put on the compost heap and don’t seem to bother the plants around them excessively as they are running on stores.
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Root chervil seed heads against a bright Aberdeen sky


There is more on TRC at:
https://www.cultivariable.com/instructions/root-crops/how-to-grow-root-chervil/
https://hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/proceedings1990/V1-422.html
 

Seed list 2017

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I’ve just posted my list of seeds collected in 2017. Ones that might be of particular interest this year include various crosses between Daubenton’s perennial kale and some of my favourite annual kales, a particuarly nice wild-collected raspberry that I have named ‘Sunset’, and a fabulously varied runner bean grex. Like last year, I’m offering the seeds on a gift economy basis, for swap, donation or pay-it-forward.

2016 seed list now out

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Apologies to website subscribers who received a post called ‘Donating’ earlier today. This was meant to go up as a new page rather than being published as a post. The news that I meant to put out today is that my 2016 seed list is now on the website as part of a redesign in which the old ‘shop’ page has been replaced by a new one which takes more of a gift-economy approach. You can read all about it at forest garden seeds.

Japanese wineberries

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Japanese wineberries (Rubus phoenicolasius) are a relative of raspberries and brambles. They are as easy to grow as raspberries and it’s surprising that they aren’t more common in the UK. There are a number of reasons why you might want to grow them. One is that they fruit in early autumn, nicely filling the gap between summer and autumn raspberries, but they are also worthwhile in their own right, different from either rasps or blackberries.

They certainly look different. The stems of Japanese wineberries are covered in red glandular hairs which give them a red, furry look (and their Latin name – phoenico means red) and an odd, somewhat sticky, somewhat waxy feel. You sometimes see insects stuck to the glands, making the plant look a little carniverous, but apparently it gains nothing nutritionally from these catches: presumably the motivation is more to do with pest control. The hairs extend onto the calyces which enclose the young fruit; as the fruit ripens the calyces slowly peel open to reveal it. The ripe fruit is a design classic. About the size of a wild raspberry, the berries are wine red and share a little in the stickiness of the canes. The taste is sweet and pleasant.

photo by Eva-Maria Kintzel

photo by Eva-Maria Kintzel

The big drawback to growing wineberries at my latitude is that not all plants offered for sale in the UK seem to thrive here. I first came across Japanese wineberry myself at the Plants for a Future site down in Cornwall and it quickly made my list of plants to acquire. Unfortunately, a succession of plants bought from nurseries in the south of England either perished over winter or grimly clung to life but never produced any fruit. Eventually I decided that it wasn’t suitable for the north of Scotland. Then a friend told me about a self-seeding population at Crathes Castle in Deeside. She obtained a seedling for me and it quickly grew into a hearty, vigorous bush that has now seen off several winters. This underlines the importance of local varieties and trying to get hold of local provenances.

Japanese wineberries like to grow in full sun. They are mostly immune to raspberry diseases but mine has poor ventilation due to a tall fence built by a neighbour and the racemes or flower heads have a tendency to rot in wet weather. From what I have seen of other plants moving it should fix this. Like most Rubus plants the stems are biennial although the plant as a whole is perennial. The fruit is borne on the second-year canes (floricanes), which should be pruned out at the end of the season. In growth habit they are somewhere between raspberries and brambles. Like brambles, the canes form a dense clump from a single point, so they need to be trained along wires or tied loosely to a stake at the centre of the clump. Fortunately they don’t spread as aggressively as brambles, but they do share their ability to root at the tips if they touch the ground: a characteristic that can be used to propagate from a superior plant.

UPDATE: You can buy Scottish-grown wineberries at https://plantsandapples.co.uk/

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Back to my roots (and tubers) – 2016

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This post (a catch up on my experiments with all things subterranean) is a little later than I expected. Many roots and tubers are not lifted until after the first hard frost. This can hit in October or even September in Aberdeen, but this year there was nothing significant until January, so many plants just kept on growing. The other factor is that I am still recovering from a slipped disc I suffered last spring, which means that I have to ration my effort in the garden and watch the heavy digging.

Now, however, the harvest is complete and the results (as well as the roots) are in.

Some plants have by now become staples of the forest garden and my winter diet, including oca, yacon, skirret, Chinese artichokes and TPS potatoes. The slipped disc meant that some of these had to cope with very late planting and considerable neglect over the year. In some cases that meant that I only just scraped through the season with my planting stock intact. Fortunately, however, roots and tubers are forgiving plants. They carry generous reserves that allow them to grow quickly and smother annual weeds, so some of them did quite respectably all the same. Roots that I allow to self-seed in the garden, such as parsnips and salsify, did so with little fuss.

These are exciting times for the breeding of many root crops. My oca and yacon both flowered, but far too late in the season for seed, so I think I’ll have to leave those projects to collaborations with a more southerly distribution, such as the Guild of Oca Breeders. Yacon was once thought to be sterile, but the Cultivariable seed company in Washington State has managed to make a range of crosses (I can highly recommend Cultivariable as a supplier of most of these plants). Yacon seems to be an obligate outcrosser – that is, it needs two or more varieties grown together to produce fertile seeds. Anyone with two varieties of yacon and enough sunshine can join in the fun.

I had more luck producing potato seeds. Potatoes also struggle to fruit in time here, but the fruits can be ripened up on the windowsill like tomatoes and will reliably produce viable seed this way. It helps that TPS (true potato seed) varieties can be stunningly blight resistant, meaning that they get the chance to keep on growing right up until the frosts. There’s more on why you might want to grow potatoes and many other things from diverse seed in my post here.

burdock burrs

burdock burrs

Another reason I find for producing my own seed is that a number of root crops can be quite difficult to grow from bought seed as they do not store well and can have tricky germination requirements. My usual way around this is to grow my own, giving super-fresh seed that I often sow in autumn rather than spring. I managed to do this with burdock (Arctium lappa) this year. My saved roots sprouted to nearly 3m high and produced an abundance of the spiky seed heads that were the inspiration for velcro. The only drawback was that they tried to recruit me as a seed vector any time I passed. Burdock seeds may get so lodged in the coat of an animal that they stay with it until it dies, giving the germinating seed exactly the rich, fertile conditions that it likes. I love my plants, but that’s where I draw the line! Seeds that I collected and sowed in autumn are already germinating despite the snow on the ground this week, so I am already looking forward to a summer of kinpira gobo.

A plant that I have similar problems in getting viable seed with is Hamburg parsley so I am trying the same approach this year, with several choice roots saved for seed production. Turnip rooted chervil (Chaerophyllum bulbosum) benefits heavily from this approach too – I’ll post more about this plant soon.

Going back to the Andean root crops, I had promising results with two more. One that I tried for the first time was ulluku (Ullucus tuberosus) – also known as papalisa, ulluco, milluku, chugua and ruba. Ulluku produces both edible leaves and tubers that taste remarkably like beetroot. It put up with severe neglect and still cropped reasonably well for me. Undoubtedly the most striking feature of ulluku is its looks: the tubers come in a dazzling array of buttercup yellows, rose pinks, lurid magenta and porcelain white. Digging them up is like unearthing semi-precious stones. On the downside, centuries of vegetative propagation have left many lines of ulluku virus-ridden and reluctant to produce seed. Yet again, Cultivariable is having spectacular results in coaxing this species back into reproductive life, so I think we can expect to hear much more about this species in the next few years, with cleaned up tubers and new varieties.

Ulluku

Ulluku – yellow variety

The other new South American is mauka (Mirabilis expansa). Mauka is described on Wikipedia as growing at “cold, windy altitudes” in the Andes, which sounds just ideal to me! My mauka seeds rather surprised me by germinating immediately when I put them in the fridge to stratify, so I now have six little mauka seedlings growing away, just waiting to experience the cold, windy altitudes of Scotland (i.e sea level).

I have spent a while gathering plants of silverweed (Argentina anserina) from different locations and planting them in large pots outside. The reason for this curious behaviour is that silverweed is a very strong spreader, so without control you will tend to have just one extensive clone in your garden. I’d like to get seeds of this plant in order to try breeding it, since it is delicious and locally well adapted, but has the drawbacks of thin, straggly roots and that agressive spreading habit. A non-runnering variety would be favourite! I wasn’t able to collect any seed last year, but the plants all look healthy and I hope for better results this year.
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Finally, a hill of beans. The bean family (Fabaceae) contains a number of species with edible roots, including talet (Amphicarpaea bracteata), hopniss (Apios americana), aardaker (Lathyrus tuberosus) and cairmeal (Lathyrus linifolius montanus). With me, the Lathyrus species have been disappointing: my aardaker has almost died out, while the cairmeal is growing quite cheerfully without producing anything that could be seriously regarded as an edible root. Neither the talet nor the hopniss made it out of the greenhouse and into the ground this year. Both seemed quite happy with this arrangement: both flowered and the talet produced seed. On the other hand, the hopniss produced only one tuber per tuber and I couldn’t find any of the subterranean beans that are meant to be the main yield of talet. Both are now lying low and, I imagine, dreaming of better weather and better health on the part of their gardener for the year ahead. Me too.

Previous posts relating to roots:
Winter harvests 2015
Back to my roots (and tubers) – 2014