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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 30/09/2008
Patient readers who have put up with me banging on about gene segregation and F2 hybrids ... here's a little photo sequence from one of my breeding projects to show the process in action. I hope this will be a lot more interesting and meaningful than my simply talking about it, since it shows what amazing and beautiful diversity is locked up within every seed. If it inspires you to have a go at some...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 28/09/2008
A plethora of newly harvested heritage beans With all the crises I've been dealing with over the summer, the garden has been badly neglected this year. To the point where I'd be embarrassed to let anyone see it, even a non-gardener. I've managed to look after the crops OK, but I didn't keep on top of the weeds earlier in the season and they've got themselves well entrenched. And I had to steel myself...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 26/09/2008
Age: don't know ... information is scarce Background: a supermarket tomato which has made an impact with resourceful gardeners My supplier: Marks & Spencer Pros: beautiful, prolific, tasty, holds up fairly well against blight Cons: none OK, so Green Tiger isn't really a heritage variety at all. At least I don't think it is. Reliable information about it is extremely scarce, so I don't really know where...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 22/09/2008
Tomato seeds for future generations, in pulps of all colours. Banana Legs (left), Black Prince (top), Douce de Picardie (right), and Caro Rich (bottom). Bugger the credit crunch ... you need never pay for a packet of tomato seeds again if you adopt the age-old practice of saving your own. Even a single fruit will yield enough seeds to last you for years (or to share with your friends) and they can...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 21/09/2008
What finer setting could you want for a real-world get together of garden-allotment bloggers than Oxford University's beautiful Botanic Garden? The tower looks like it's rising up out of that building but it's actually the Magdalen College tower on the other side of the road. Apart from me there were: Bifurcated Carrots - Veg Plotting - Spadework - The Plot Thickens - Fluffius Muppetus - Soilman -...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 13/09/2008
Tomato diversity ... these beauties were mostly grown in my newly-acquired greenhouse, which has given them some temporary respite from the blight My apologies to regular readers for an unplanned two month hiatus from blogging. We've been having a horrible couple of months, and it's taken its toll on my health to the extent that I haven't been able to keep up with things. I have a huge stack of unanswered...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 05/07/2008
All together now ... oooooooooooh!! The red-podded peas have now completed their life cycle, and in fact have started a new one, because I've already sown a batch of their F3 offspring. Red-podded peas were an unexpected gift from my Purple Mangetout Project, which I'm doing on behalf of The Real Seed Catalogue . I really have to thank Ben of Real Seeds for making it happen. He sent me the Golden Sweet...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 30/06/2008
If you're not yet acquainted with the news that gardens and allotments across Britain are being contaminated with a toxic herbicide residue, you can read the full story in today's Observer . There's also a very detailed article about it (with pictures of contaminated plants) from some of the growers affected at Green Lane Allotments . The gist of it is this. Gardeners (including organic ones) have...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 29/06/2008
Black Prince is a Siberian heirloom variety given to me by Patrick of Bifurcated Carrots and has good old-fashioned classic tomato flowers, on curiously hairy stalks. The fruits should turn out to be a deep dark dusky red. Was anyone else as disgusted as I was by the debate about welfare standards in chicken farming on Newsnight last night? Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was referring to chickens as "birds"...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 27/06/2008
Outtakes from my yellow sugarsnap pea breeding project. Now that the yellow sugarsnap project F2 generation has reached full maturity I'm having to decide which lines I want to keep seed from. 63 plants to choose from, each one unique. I could just keep seed from all of them, but that's a lot of work and cataloguing for seeds I will probably never use. So I'm just keeping the most interesting looking...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 24/06/2008
I thought maybe it's time I explained why my pace of blogging has slowed recently, and why I've got so behind with commenting on other blogs, and responding to emails and everything else. There's been a bit of a setback with the music which has distracted my attention away from the garden. The small independent record label who released my album Mind The Gap has gone tits-up, and I haven't been paid...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 23/06/2008
Merry is the summertime when you're a pea. This is Sugar Magnolia strutting its stuff with industrial-strength tendrils. All the pea breeding projects are a delight at the moment, and this is just one of the attractive new phenotypes. It's an F2 from a cross between Mr Bethell's Purple Podded and Alderman . In all my purple pod experiments, the offspring separate out into pure purples, pure greens,...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 21/06/2008
Seeds are survivors. This one has germinated in the old drainpipe above my water butt. As my post of out-of-date seeds seems to have gone down well I thought it was worth pointing out this story from The Guardian earlier this week. A new record has been set for the world's oldest viable seed ... a date palm from the edge of the Judean desert, which germinated in a research facility in Jerusalem. The...
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 06/06/2008
Well the answer is mostly GREEN podded peas, actually. That's something I hadn't predicted and I don't quite know why it's happening. You also of course get some yellow podders and purple podders as the genes segregate out. The photo above shows some Golden Sweet x Desiree F2 plants ... these are siblings from the same batch of seeds and have segregated into yellows and purples (as well as greens)....
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Daughter of the Soil (Free subscription) | 04/06/2008
First rose of the season. No idea what variety it is, I inherited it when I moved here. Here's a few shots from around the garden over the last month. And with a bit of luck my pictures might get better from this month onward. My husband just won a merit award for his excellent teaching (he's a psychology lecturer at the University of Bath) and the award came with a modest cash bonus. As he didn't...
