Vegetable Petition - please read by 19 April

The following was written by Anne Gibson, The Micro Gardener – https://themicrogardener.com  it is on my blog with permission.

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The safety of our organic seed is at risk and we need YOUR help. We deserve the right to eat, grow and buy safe seeds, but our government is planning on mandatory chemical treatment of many organic varieties of imported seeds. Incredibly, 98% of Australia’s vegetable seed is from overseas and the variety of vegetable seed cultivars we have access to now, is at risk of significantly reducing.

First it was organic rockmelon seeds and now Brassica seeds are at risk. Soon, other plant families are to follow.

Please read and sign this petition. Every voice makes a difference. If you're not already, please start saving your seeds. Thanks for your help. Let's get the word out. We only have until 19 April. 

Alpine Strawberries in Australia

I have been getting a few questions over alpine strawberries so thought I would write a short blog post to clear up some things.  Alpine strawberries are different from garden strawberries in a number of ways, if you intend to grow them you should probably be aware of these differences.  I grow them, and I think they are great, but I also know what to expect from them. 

Various alpine strawberries, small and delicious

Alpine strawberries are a wild type of strawberry that grows across Europe.  They tend to be smaller plants that garden strawberries, and the ones I have grown seem to be hardier and more resistant to pretty much everything than I would have expected from such dainty little plants.  

Orphan bees

We had a bee swarm visit us!

On Saturday 3 March a friendly swarm of honey bees decided to visit.  They flew in and created an impressive and frantic swarm, then they settled on one of our fruit trees.  At first there were plenty of bees flying here and there and getting caught in spider webs and things.  After a little while they calmed down and politely waited while the scout bees were looking for a more permanent home.

Being Autumn I was a little surprised to see them.  As you can see, they settled into a friendly little clump.  Over the next few hours I grew fond of them and decided to quickly pull together a hive in which to keep them, and planned on building something better later.

Unfortunately the swarm had other ideas, and they left.

I miss my little bee swarm.

White fruited mulberries

Mulberries are delicious, they are one of the greatest tasting and easiest to grow temperate fruit trees.  The mulberry trees are fast growing, high yielding, and reasonably hardy.  As well as being great to eat, they are very simple to grow and the tree is nice enough to look at and is great for shade.

Mulberry trees have a few problems though, the fruit does not transport or store well, the fruit also will not ripen once picked, for these reasons you never see them for sale in the shops.  Unfortunately for some reason you also don't see things like mulberry pies in shops.

Another problem is the mess and stains from the fruit.  White mulberry (Morus alba) often have dark fruit that stain everything.  You get stains from dropped fruit and on fingers while eating them, smushing unripe fruit takes away the stain from fingers.  More annoyingly birds eat the mulberry fruit and deposit stains on washing etc.  Luckily there are a few strains of white mulberries that are white fruited which do not stain.

A few years ago I bought a mulberry tree from Rodney's nursery in Pialligo.  It was a white mulberry (Morus alba) and I paid extra for a white fruited one.  It had a tag that was the same as the pictures below (which are not my pictures, they were found on gumtree).

White fruited white mulberry - picture from gumtree

Days to maturity Chester Thornless Blackberry

One of the berries I grew this year was a thornless blackberry known as 'Chester'.  Chester is meant to be one of the tastier and more cold hardy of the thornless blackberries.

Unlike some of the varieties of thornless blackberry such as Waldo, Chester is said to be relatively productive and tasty.  Also unlike many varieties of blackberry it is legal to grow, sell, propagate, distribute etc Chester blackberries in NSW.

Unfortunately the heat hit at the wrong time and we lost most of the berries, hopefully next year when the plant is larger we get a larger crop. They do taste good, but I far prefer my thornless youngberries.

Days to maturity Thornless Chester Blackberry (Rubus fruticosus species aggregate)

Seeds planted       N/A grown from divisions
Germinated           N/A
Flowered              26/11/2017       Day 0
Fruit Ripe              06/01/2018       Day 41

Days to Maturity raspberries from seed

Not many people grow raspberries from seed.  To be honest, unless you have some reason to grow them from seed it is probably best not to.  Most people grow from existing plants, which is far easier, much faster, and far more reliable.

Raspberries are not the easiest seed to germinate, or the easiest seedling to care for.  Most, if not all, are highly heterozygous, meaning that each seed will be genetically unique.  They take a long time to germinate, they are tiny and take  a long time to grow, meaning you have to water them and protect them from slugs, snails and insects over this time.  Then the resultant fruit may be delicious or bland or sweet or sour or anywhere in between.

If you are going to grow raspberries from seed you should NEVER  EVER buy it from ebay as there are too many thieves on ebay selling fake seeds.  Very few seed sellers carry raspberry seed, and many who do make all kinds of dishonest claims about them.  This means if you plan to grow it you will need to get fresh raspberries and save the seed yourself.

Knowing all of this, if you still choose to grow raspberries from seed (perhaps you have some interesting breeding project in mind) I thought I would record raspberry days to maturity from seed.  I wish I started keeping a record of days to maturity a long time ago.


Days to maturity Red Raspberry (Rubus idaeus) from seed

Seeds planted       16/09/2017             Day 0
Germinated           21/12/2017             Day 96
Flowered              Not Yet Flowered - still tiny
Fruit Ripe              Not Yet Fruited

Raspberry seedling with first true leaf

Raspberry seedlings next to chilli seedlings - raspberry seedlings are tiny

Igloo tomato

I wrote a post about finding seeds from the first tomatoes that I ever bred.  I have grown them twice since then, the first time I was amazed at how fit for purpose and great they were.  The second time I grew them I decided to record some stats. 

The first tomato variety I bred I have named ‘Igloo’ after my first son.  It is a sturdy and productive plant that grew to be well under two feet tall.  The Igloo tomato fruit is red and round, this is because at the time I was developing it I only had access to red round tomatoes as breeding stock.  I wanted relatively small fruit as large fruit takes longer to ripen and faces more danger of something damaging the fruit before it is picked.  Most of the fruits were just over 45 grams in weight, they are relatively uniform.

Igloo tomato - the first tomato variety I bred

When I was developing this variety I lived in a climate with a very short summer, so I wanted fast ripening small tomatoes.  This is one of the earliest ripening tomatoes I have grown and was the first to ripen of my productive tomatoes (ie Micro Tom ripened first but doesn’t count).  This year it took 147 days from planting the seed to picking the first ripe fruit.  When you look at my vegetable days to harvest page you will notice that this is very early.  I also wanted something that would set fruit in the cold, which this variety does well.

I didn’t have a great deal of access to water and had to carry manure to fertilise the soil, so I wanted short plants that did not waste resources on growing tall and did not need huge amounts of water.  These Igloo tomatoes only grow one to two feet tall, usually around 1 foot tall depending on growing conditions.  They don’t appear to be too water hungry but I haven’t tried growing them without watering.  All tomatoes need water, don’t let anyone make you think that they don’t.

Igloo tomato - absolutely covered in flowers

The taste of Igloo tomato is very good, probably a bit more sweet than it is sour, but a good mix of both.  If eaten too early they taste ok, if left to ripen properly the taste is far superior.  As with any tomato they are best not refrigerated as it impacts on the taste.  Also like any other variety of tomato they taste best when ripened on the plant and grown in much sun and warmth.

Igloo tomato, loaded with unripe fruit

Igloo tomato is what would be considered to be a determinate variety, or possibly semi-determinate, it sets flowers/fruit at the end of the growing point.  Unlike most determinate tomato varieties, once it has set fruit it tends to put out a few more shoots lower down and starts again.  This means it crops over an extended period.  Each flower truss tends to have 16 flowers, some have more but 16 seems very common.  Even though you would probably consider them to be determinate they do ripen over a very long period of time.

I was amazed at how absolutely covered in fruit this small plant was, it was very productive for such a small plant.  Rather than estimate the number I decided to count every fruit and record it after I picked it.

Over the summer of 2017/2018 my Igloo tomato has already produced a flush of 242 tomatoes and has started to put out a few more branches and has started to flower again.  We lost some tomatoes to insects and birds (and the kids probably picked some that I didn’t know about) so I have not included them in the count.

I didn’t weigh each fruit, but if the average weight is 45 grams this represents a harvest of 10.89 kg of tomatoes from one Igloo tomato plant so far.  This is excellent when you consider that the plant took up a small amount of space and was around 1 foot tall.

 

I sell seeds of Igloo tomato, as well as some other vegetables seeds and perennial vegetable plants on my for sale page.