I’ve done a last bit of seed cleaning over the holidays, so that’s my seed list finished for seeds collected in 2024. You can find the full, up to date list in the SEEDS section.

Maybe I shouldn’t call it a seed list any more though, as I’ve been experimenting over the years with ways to send other bits of plants through the post and there is now a fair variety of roots, tubers, rhizomes, bulbs, bulbils, runners and whatnot on the list. This is something I want to do even more of in the future.

A few of the plants are of particular interest. I’ve been mucking about trying to improve skirret (Sium sisarum) for many years now and am starting to see some progress. For anyone who doesn’t know it, skirret is a very useful plant in the carrot family which produces a bundle of sweet-tasting roots. To harvest it, you just dig it up, snip off some of the roots and replant. Its main drawback is a fibrous core to some of the roots and I have been trying to eliminate this. I haven’t got rid of it from my entire gene pool yet, but I have an increasing number of clones that I’ve been following for several years and have found to be consistently core-free. The seed I offer comes from these plants. That isn’t a guarantee that the offspring will be the same, but it should definitely increase the odds. I am busy bulking up the best plants and in the future I hope I’ll have enough to send out crowns instead of seed. For now, although I can send crowns they are only the regular, unimproved version.

Then there are the perennial kales. where for reasons of space I’ve had to concentrate on a few of the most promising lines. My favourite, but also currently the most frustrating, is the perennial Nero di Toscana. A successful cross between my most reliably perennial clone (which I christened Purple Kale Tree) and annual Nero di Toscana gave several similar plants with leaves similar to its Italian parent but a much taller growing habit. Unfortunately if anything this has been too successful a perennialisation. After a few years of producing seeds the original clones have now renounced the habit and become fully asexual perennials. I had hoped to back-cross them with annual NdT, but I am now having to do this with their offspring instead. Watch this space.

Another attempt to perennialise an existing kale is going better. Pentland Brig is a favourite of mine and it has been self seeding in the allotment for years, interbreeding with the perennials in the process. I’ve selected fairly hard for staying true to type, which rather selects against perennial genes, but nonetheless my plants have been becoming slowly more long-lived and are starting to reach the balance between flowering and growth that I look for while staying recognisably Brig-ish. Finally there are the variegated kales. I can’t resist selecting for this trait and again it’s slowly becoming more widespread. Of course selection for a purely visual trait reduces the ability to select for anything else, so these aren’t my best kales, but I’d like to keep it in the population so that it can cross with the more culinary ones. Starting in the spring I can send out a limited number of cuttings of my more interesting plants as well as the seeds.

Aside from the plant breeding, I’m still acquiring and trying out new species. Korean celery (Dystaenia takesimana) has impressed me and has also provided plenty of seeds for me to share. A new discovery this year has been pearl onion, which despite the name is actually a leek. that forms an ever-dividing clump of plants with marble-sized bulbs. I’d always thought it would be impossibly fiddly, but having been given a division of a variety called Minogue’s Onion I’ve found it very useful as the plantlets, although small, need minimal preparation and so far they have soldiered on through everything the winter can throw at them. I’ve also managed to propagate a number of new edible Lilium species. For now they are too small to produced seed, but perhaps in the future I’ll add them to the list.