Tokyo Bekana cross Bok Choy

Bok choy and Tokyo bekana are both varieties of Brassica rapa.  This means that these nutritious cabbages can and do cross pollinate very easily unless care is taken to prevent this.  

These are both highly nutritious vegetables, both are very simple and fast to grow, and seed of both is readily available and reasonably simple to save.  Both of these should be considered in any home vegetable garden. 

Last year I grew them both, along with various other winter greens and wrote a comparison of them.  I isolated them to collect some pure seed to grow the following year.  As well as this I made some deliberate crosses between them.  The photo below shows the two parents I used in this cross.  

Bok choy and Tokyo bekana

Below is a photo of bok choy on the left, Tokyo bekana on the right, and the cross in the middle.  It is pretty obvious that the cross is different from Tokyo bekana and bok choy. 

Not surprisingly, this F1 cross was pretty much part way between the two parents in all respects.

The plant looked similar to bok choy, but a lot larger, and a bit messier in growth habit.  The leaf edges in the cross were slightly crinked or slightly wavy.  

The petioles (white stems) of the cross are far larger, and the white veins are far more noticeable than the bok choy parent.  

The green colour of the leaf (which is not easy to see in the photo but is pretty obvious in real life) is part way between the darker green of bok choy and the vibrant lettuce green of Tokyo bekana.

The leaf texture was pretty much half way between the two, not as crunchy as Tokyo bekana and not as...I don't know the word...as bok choy.  

The taste of this cross was basically half way between bok choy and Tokyo bekana.  It tastes nice, which was expected given both parents taste nice.  

Bok choy on left, cross in middle, Tokyo bekana on right

I like both of the parent plants, and I like the cross between them.  

The cross tastes good, and it is just as easy and fast to grow as either parent.  It was not bothered by pests any more than either parent (we get slight issues from cabbage white butterflies, but nothing too serious), and it was significantly larger and more productive than the bok choy parent.  

Even with all its benefits, I am not sure if I will bother stabilising this cross.  I might keep growing it and stabilise something, but at this stage that seems unlikely.  I like both parents, they are both great, so unless something unexpected happens the cross may be the end of its line.  

Tokyo bekana bok choy cross with both parents

That isn't to say that I am not considering to re-try this cross.  I think if I ever re-do this cross I would use different parents, and would get a better result faster.  I would probably still use the Tokyo bekana, but if I were to try this cross again I would use a different variety of bok choy.

There are many varieties of bok choy, ranging from micro dwarf Hedou bok choy (which I grow and enjoy), all the way to some reasonably large varieties.  

I used a baby bok choy in the above cross, and the hybrid was significantly larger than that parent.  If I were to try this cross again I would try to track down the largest bok choy I could find and use that as the parent.  Perhaps this combination could produce a very large bok choy.  

A very large bok choy could be worth growing, and could provide some benefit to growing it alongside the parent varieties.  

There is a vegetable called De Zhou cabbage, I believe that Tokyo bekana was one of the parents that contributed to this variety.  I am tempted to get this to use as a parent in crosses, and am tempted to create my own version, and am also tempted to let this slip and just grow the plants I have.  So far I have not decided what I will do.  

Bok Choy Tokyo Bekana - cross breeding

As well as the deliberate cross above, I allowed some plants to open pollinate, set seed, and drop seed by themselves.  I mostly let them flower for the pollintors, and planned to remove them before seed set, but some got away from me and dropped some seed.  There were a few different varieties of B rapa flowering, all of which could easily cross with one another as no attempt was made to isolate them.  

I didn't have a lot of space to spare, so couldn't allow many self seeded plants to grow.  From those that were not removed I got some vigorous volunteer plants, most were true to type, and a few were clearly crossed.  

We have been eating all of them and feeding all of them to the chickens.  Some are better than others, anything substandard will be removed before flowering as I don't want substandard genetic getting into the gene pool.  

One of the random crosses that I may keep had a noticeable purple smudge, and a slightly purple tinge to the petioles and leaf veins.  It is difficult to see in the photo below, but the purple is there.  The colouration is far more noticeable in real life. 

Slight colouration in the veins and petioles

Given the shape and colouration of this plant, my guess is the seed parent was purple stemmed hon tsai tai, and the pollen parent may have been Tokyo bekana.  Both of them are Brassica rapa so are simple to cross.  Interestingly enough, I was considering trying that cross but didn't actually get around to it last year.  

The taste of this plant is nice enough, certainly better than most leafy vegetables I can buy.  While good, it is nothing to rave about.  The taste is not as sweet as hon tsai tai, and the texure is not as crisp as Tokyo bekana.  At this stage I prefer both parents to their cross.

Purple smudge is more noticeable in real life 

The plant itself is too messy looking for my liking, while it is more productive than hon tsai tai it is not productive enough, and there is not enough colour.  I am not overly fond of this plant, but it is only F1 at this point.  Future generations could segregate and have any/all/none of the characteristics I want.  I plan to bag this plant so it self pollinates, and I will attempt to collect the seed.  

The F2 seedlings should show a lot of variation, and from there I can decide if I want to continue this line or to start again.  Only highly coloured, highly vigorous plants that taste nice are to be kept.  Perhaps I won't keep any and will feed them all to the chickens, only time will tell.

Large flowers in dense heads

Messy, reasonably productive, large leaves

I like hon tsai tai.  The leaves taste almost sweet, and the purple colour is rather pretty.  I find the plants are a bit too messy looking, and for me it is not productive enough to grow as as a leaf vegetable, but the taste is very good.  When grown for the flower stalks like broccoli, the hon tsai tai can be very productive and can send up many flower stalks.  The taste of these is good, far better in my opinion than true broccoli. 

The hon tsai tai in the photos below was self seeded.  It had a lot of competition, very poor soil, and has not grown to its potential.  It gives you an idea of the colouration.  You may notice the leaf petioles have a deep colour, and the veins only have slight colour, this seems to vary from plant to plant and I am not sure if this is due to genetics or is largely environmental.  Had I picked this flower stem it would have sent up a lot more very quickly.  

I am not sure if I will allow this plant to set seed, I am leaving it for now as it is one of the few things that is flowering at the moment.  I like to have a few things always flowering to feed to local pollinators.  Pollinators seem to love brassica flowers, and hon tsai tai can grow many flowers over an extended period.

Purple stemmed hon tsai tai

Hon tsai tai colour

Another cross I have considered is hon tsai tai with bok choy.  I would like a compact neat looking bok choy with coloured stems.  I have some bok choy with green stems, others with white, but nothing with vivid stems and green leaves.  

I am not sure if the outcome is achievable, or if the project will just end in substandard unproductive plants.  I know a few other people have tried similar breeding projects, and have developed things like 'vivid choy' or 'rainbow tatsoi'.  I think vivid choy looks messy, and does not seem to be a huge improvement to hon tsai tai.  

I love the shape of bok choy.  To me it is one of the prettiest vegetables.  If I breed anything that loses that bok choy shape, I think I may be better off not using bok choy in the breeding program at all and may be better off using one of the many other versions of  Brassica rapa that are available.  

Sometimes I sell seed of some of these vegetables through my for sale page.  I should bag some flowers and offer a few of the varieties that I grow as they are nice to eat and very nutritious.  Most are pretty common, others such as senposai are far less common.  

Woolly micro tomato update

It is time for an update on my micro woolly tomato breeding project.  

For a bit of background, I crossed a micro tomato which only grows to about 10cm tall, with a woolly leaf tomato which reaches about 6 feet tall.  I used a micro tomato as the seed parent so it was simple to see if the cross worked really early. 

I grew the F1 in the year 2021, the F1 plant reached about 5 feet tall, was very productive, and the fruit looked intermediate between both parents.  

Micro woolly tomato breeding

I culled the F2, only keeping the smaller woolly leaf plants.  Then culled subsequent generations based largely on plant size, and to a lesser extent based on fruit colour and taste.  Last year I had a mishap and lost many of my seeds from this project, sadly things like that sometimes happen in breeding projects. 

This summer (2023-2024) I culled and was left with four candidates, I put the four candidates in one pot for ease of handling.  

While it is far better to have them in separate pots, or even in the soil, that was not an option this year.  

Woolly foliage tomatoes

The four remaining plants are between 5cm tall and 15cm tall, they all set flowers at their terminal bud, all are woolly, and all appear to be expressing anthocyanin in their leaves and stems.  

At this stage I don't know what base colour the fruit will be, or how they will taste. 

Unripe woolly tomato 

While several of the plants are larger than Micro Tom (pictured below), up to 15cm tall, or about 6 inches, is still probably considered to be a micro dwarf tomato.  These were partly shaded in the greenhouse and are likely taller than they would have been if grown under direct light.  There are a few generations until they will be stabilised, so even if they are not micro dwarf tomatoes that is ok at this stage.  

The smallest candidate is producing flower buds, and is only around 5cm, or about 2 inches, tall.  This may be a genetically tiny plant, or it may be stunted by growing so close to the pother plants.  I won't know until I grow out its seeds.  

Micro tomato plants are tiny

One of the things I like about micro tomatoes is they are so quick to mature that they can produce several generations each year.  My winters can be a bit long, so I sometimes lose a generation to frosts, but in a mild year I can grow a few generations and make some decent progress.

I was growing these plants in my greenhouse as I didn't start them until late in the season and they needed protection from the heat.  I have recently moved the pot outside into full sun.  Hopefully there is enough heat left in the season for them to set fruit and for me to collect seed.  

Woolly foliage, high anthocyanin 

Even if all goes well, this project is still a few generations away from completion.  Hopefully one or several of these four are what I am hoping for, then I can work on stabilising the lines.  

Fingers crossed in another few years I have a few stable lines of new micro tomatoes that taste good.  If not, I can do a little back crossing to lock in the traits I want, or I could start again.  

Igloo tomatoes

One of my first attempts at breeding tomatoes is also one of my best.  This project began when I was in high school where I had limited access to germplasm and limited knowledge of genetics and breeding.  

I was aiming to breed a tasty, highly productive, early ripening tomato that did not need much water.  Igloo tomatoes tick all of these boxes and more.  

Igloo tomatoes produce red and round tomatoes, they are small salad size tomato, but large enough to be sliced onto sandwiches.  They are remarkably uniform in size, each weighing slightly under 50 grams.

Igloo tomatoes weight almost 50g each

Igloo tomato plants are stocky compact things only growing to around 1 foot tall, sometimes reaching under 2 feet tall.  Being smaller plants means the space can be used for other things, it also means they are not draining nutrients from the soil merely to produce length of stem.  They do require staking as the amount of fruit they produce is too much even for stout little trunks to hold without some support.  

Being small plants does not mean they are less productive, incredibly Igloo tomatoes are one of the most productive tomatoes I grow.  

Each truss has around 16 flowers, sometimes a few more or a few less.  Each plant produces several hundred red round fruit over the season, for me when crammed in too close to other tomato plants they usually around 12kg of ripe fruit.  This doesn't sound like a lot, but 12 kg of fruit produced on a plant that is only a foot tall and one foot wide is spectacular.  

Igloo tomatoes

For me they are always among the first tomatoes to ripen.  Last time I recorded days, it took 147 days from planting the seed until I picked the first ripe fruit.  This is incredibly quick.  They produce the bulk of fruit before other varieties (including most cherry tomatoes) even start to ripen.  

It is probably best described as semi-determinate.  It does produce a lot of fruit early in the season when no other tomatoes are ripe, and it produces fewer fruits towards the end of the season when many larger and later varieties are ripening.  Even though it is producing less towards the later end of the season, igloo tomatoes always keep producing up until a killing frost.  I have never tried to overwinter them, so don't know how long they can live if protected.

The fruit has a little elbow on the stem, making picking ripe fruit easy an fast.  I think they have the uniform ripening gene, which means the fruit are very evenly red.  I am not a huge fan of the uniform ripening gene, and much prefer fruit with green shoulders, but it was prevalent in the germplasm I had access to at the time I was developing this variety.  

Igloo tomato

Igloo tomatoes never crack or split even if watering is erratic.  I have never had any blossom end rot on these even when other varieties planted next to them are besotted in blossom end rot.  Never cracking, and never succumbing to blossom end rot, means there is not a lot of wasted fruit.

Not only are they among the first to ripen in my garden, they are also one of the few varieties that consistently provide large yields.  Some years the conditions are a bit harsh and other varieties don't really crop, igloo tomatoes always produce about 12 kg of ripe fruit for me.  

Igloo tomatoes produce large seeds, meaning that seed saving is simple.  Larger seeds also tend to remain viable for longer than small seeded varieties.  While seed is always best when relatively fresh, I have grown seed from this that was over 20 years old and had been stored dry in a cupboard.  

igloo tomatoes - not all are ripe enough

I find that these taste ok when not quite ripe enough, but taste great if left to ripen fully.  I tend to allow them to ripen on the plant, but they can be picked early and ripened on the bench.  Like every tomato, they taste best if not put in the fridge.  

I have no idea how well this variety copes with humid coastal conditions, all I know is it performs well for me and produces large amounts of food even with a short growing season.

I have donated seeds of Igloo tomato to a few different community seed saving groups (and encouraged them to distribute the seeds among their members) as it does have the potential to feed a lot of people using a small amount of space.  I hoped to get some feedback about how they perform under different conditions in people's backyards.  Unfortunately I have never heard anything from any of them, and don't know if they have even planted the seeds.  I hope that at least some of them shared the seeds among their members.  

While I am biased because I developed this variety, I think it is a great tomato.  It tastes good, looks nice, provides a huge crop on a small plant, never suffers diseases, ripens early, and is simple to save seeds from.  

If you are interested in buying seed for Igloo tomatoes I list them on my for sale page along with various other vegetable seeds, perennial vegetable plants, and edible herbs.  

Giant Broad Leaf Dandelion

I have been breeding dandelions (Taraxacum officinale) for a few years.  Not just deliberately growing them, but intentionally breeding with the aim of improving them.

Given that every part of this remarkable plant is edible and useful, I mostly focused on breeding for larger leaves.  I also grow pink dandelions (Taraxacum pseudoroseum), I have not done any breeding work with pink dandelions and given how difficult it is to work with them I like never will.  

Giant dandelion leaf 47cm long

Breeding dandelions is difficult, I find it far more difficult than other vegetables.  

The 'flower' on a dandelion plant is hundreds of tiny flowers crammed closely together.  Individual dandelion flowers are tiny.  All parts of the flowers are tiny and are very difficult to work with.  Emasculating flowers to prevent self pollination is difficult as they are tiny, and not always effective as they can produce seeds through apomixis without any pollination.  Due to apomixis, when cross pollinating I have no idea if the cross worked, or if the resultant seed will be a clone of the mother plant.  Adding selective pressure does not always cause genetic drift, again this is due to apomixis.  

Further complicating dandelion breeding is the fact that most dandelions are triploid, and most dandelions in Australia are usually sterile triploids that reproduce by obligate apomixis.  

Unfortunately, while I understand the theory of this, I don't have a good understanding of what this means in practice.  There has been some research into dandelion ploidy and breeding, which I found interesting.  This research indicates that while it should be theoretically impossible to breed using triploid dandelions, it is experimentally possible.  

While there was a concerted effort to breed dandelions, there is very little literature on how to breed dandelions.  Most of this was written by the Soviets, is poorly translated, and largely deals with Taraxacum koksaghyz and breeding it for rubber yield.  

I believe there were a few dandelion farms in Tasmania and Western Australia.  Like much of this country's past, this seems to have been largely forgotten and lost to history.  I wish I could get hold of T koksaghyz, perhaps some day I will track down someone who has seed that they are willing to share with me.  

For these reasons I gave dandelion breeding my best shot, hoped it would work, and figured nothing useful would come of it.  I am happy to say, my breeding efforts yielded impressive results (and at the same time was kind of pointless).

These dandelion leaves grow wide

When starting to breed dandelions I focused mostly on length of leaves as this is simple to measure.  Dandelions produce longer leaves in certain seasons, and under certain growing conditions, so I had to be careful to 'compare apples with apples'. 

Dandelion grow out - leaf comparison

I have a good line in which mature plants consistently produces leaves around 50cm long.  This was a good start.  I considered leaving it there, but my plants weren't as useful as I wanted them to be.  

I had a few plants that produced leaves that were not quite as long, but were wider at certain times of the year.  These are probably more useful as a vegetable.  More leafy and less stalk.  I wondered if I could work with these wider plants, and make them even more useful.  So I (somewhat begrudgingly) did some more breeding work with them.  

Giant dandelion on left, regular dandelion on right

After a lot of fiddly work, most of which yielded exact clones of the parent plant or no seed at all due to rough handling, I started to see some progress.  This encouraged me to do a little more work.  

Again my efforts were largely frustrated by either aborted seed or exact clones of the parent, but among them were some successes.  I am certainly no expert in this area, and my results were patchy at best.  After quite some time my giant edible dandelions are incredible.  

The leaves of my dandelions often measure 6 to 7 inches wide, and are usually a little under 50 cm long.  In winter the leaves are smaller, if they don't have enough water they are smaller, and if shaded they can grow a little larger.  

Dandelion leaf over 6 inches wide

These larger wider leaves are great.  They are far more useable in a salad, or easier to feed to animals.  While I haven't tried it, I assume they could be used to wrap food similar to grape leaves or mulberry leaf. 

I am not keen on how bitter raw dandelion leaves can be, these large broad leaves taste milder and much less bitter.  Dandelion leaves tend to be less bitter before flowering, and become increasingly bitter as the plant flowers.  These giant broad dandelion leaves are pretty mild even when in bloom.  I didn't select for this trait, it was just a nice surprise with the giant plants.  

These plants need more water than lawn weeds if they are to reach their potential.  Regular lawn dandelions don't cope in the dry, these giant broad leaf dandelions really don't cope being very dry.  They tend to survive being dry if they are well established, but the resultant plants are a mere fraction of the size of what they could have been.  

Being so large, these plants need room to grow.  When grown in a pot they are always stunted.  When grown in the garden their roots can penetrate deep in search of nutrients, and they grow far larger.  They survive surprisingly well with competition, but grow a lot larger and faster if you remove their competition.  

I don't think it comes as a surprise to anyone that fertile soil is needed for them to grow large.  Poor soils result in much smaller plants.  

Dandelion leaf over 6 inches wide

These massive dandelions also seem to suffer from a leaf disease from time to time.  This disease produces spots on the leaves, it is possibly some form of leaf rust fungus.  I see this appear on regular dandelions from time to time, but it seems to affect the giant ones far more.  

Dandelion leaf spot

I am sure you could spray with something to control this.  I grow everything organically, so I am not sure how to prevent this disease, all I know is if I leave the infected leaf alone the disease will spread to other leaves.  When I see this disease I remove infected leaves and feed them to the guinea pigs or chickens, this seems to stop it spreading.  

I don't put the infected leaf in the compost for fear it will produce spores and spread, feeding it to an animal seems to destroy the pathogen.  The plant grows replacement leaves and is healthy once the spotty leaf has been removed.  This indicates that the disease is not systemic.  

Dandelion leaves over a foot and a half long

Growing dandelions from seed is simple.  They germinate best when fresh, and germination rates seem to decline quickly as seed ages.  I find light improves germination, so I plant dandelion seed much like lettuce seed.  I plant them in pots or trays of soil, and press seeds into the mix and water in.  From there I treat them the same as I treat lettuce.  

I tend to sow the seeds reasonably thick.  Dandelion seedlings start out small.  I let the seedlings grow a while before transplanting them somewhere in the garden.  Once transplanted, they need a lot of water to become established, other than that I treat them like any vegetable.  

Dandelion seedlings

Dandelion seedlings larger and ready for transplanting

After several years and an absurd amount of effort, I now have good lines of giant dandelions.  They are so large that when people see an individual leaf they often ask me what they are, and do not believe me when I explain they are dandelions.  

I do sell seed of these giant dandelions, as well as pink dandelions, through my for sale page.  The flowers were open pollinated, but there is a good chance they will produce plants that are clones of the mother.  If they were somehow pollinated by another plant, they will have 50% genes from the mother plant and should still grow huge.  If you are interested, everything I have for sale will be listed on my for sale page.  

Giant Parsley Breeding

A few years ago I started breeding giant parsley (Petroselinum crispum).  Parsley used to be a common garnish when I was a child.  When I was a little older a sprig of parsley used to be put on steaks or other meals at restaurants, with the intention that it was discarded rather than eaten.  Since then it has fallen even more out of favour.  Some people still grow parsley, and a few eat it, but it is a largely underutilised crop.  

I wanted to develop a new variety of parsley to be big and productive, so it could be primarily used as a leaf vegetable.  Eventually I had a variety (albeit not a completely stable variety) of comically large parsley that dwarfs any of the 'giant' varieties.  The taste of this huge parsley is much like other flat leaf varieties, perhaps a little stronger. 

Then, for a number of reasons, I stopped my breeding project.  I felt my parsley was getting too big.  I stopped selecting for larger plants, and other than picking leaves I mostly ignored my parsley and let it do its own thing.   

Parsley almost as long as my arm

Parsley is great.  It is simple to grow and in my garden it self seeds reliably.  For this reason I still have a lot of parsley around, all of which is descended from my giant parsley breeding project.  As there were a few generations with no selective pressure, there may have been some genetic drift.  Some plants are far larger than others.

Recently I spoke to someone who wanted a giant parsley and complained about how tiny and unimpressive 'Giant of Italy' parsley is.  He convinced me that there is merit in making parsley huge.  

After that conversation I went to my garden and looked to see what size parsley I have to work with if I ever wanted to increase its size again.  

As you can see, I still have some plants with reasonable size.  According to Wikipedia, Parsley leaves grow 10cm to 25cm long in its first year.  My parsley produce leaves that are far larger than that.  The leaf above is almost as long as my arm!  I measured a few leaves from my largest plants, and they were over 60cm long.  Some were about 67cm long.  

Parsley leaf around 66cm (26 inch) long

Parsley leaf about 67cm (26 inch) long

This parsley is still pretty big.  I have a number of plants around this size, and between them they probably have all the genetic potential to get a bit larger if I put in some effort.  I also have some smaller plants, I won't be allowing these to flower so their genes won't be in the mix. 

I once wondered if parsley petioles (leaf stalks) could be large enough to be used instead of celery stalks.  I had put some effort into breeding for fatter petioles and they were getting quite thick.  All of the leaf stalks in the celery at the moment are still a bit thin.  Most are about 1cm to 1.5cm thick.  This is still a lot thicker than the stuff you find in the supermarket, but not thick enough to replace celery.  At this stage I am undecided if I care too much about how thick the stalks are.

The parsley plant itself gets rather large and bushy.  I put a tape measure from the soil to give a bit of perspective.  For most of its growing season they are about two feet tall.  This is too large to grow on a windowsill, but it is a good size to grow in the garden or a large pot.  As you can see, it has a lot of leaves that can be picked.

Over the years I have had a lot of people come to my house to buy plants and seeds.  Some of these people have been gardening since before I was born.  My giant parsley astounds everyone who sees it.  Some people have to pick some and taste it before they can believe that it is even parsley.  

When this parsley flowers it can get very tall.  They tower over me when they are in bloom.  I am not exactly sure how tall they get as I never particularly cared how tall they reach and never measured them.  Flowering height is not something I would put any breeding effort into, but I should measure it one day just out of curiosity.  

Some leaves have a lot of stem and not enough leaf.  Others have a lot of leaf and not too much stem.  I never paid a great deal of attention to this as I believe it may be highly influenced by the growing environment.  

You can eat the stems, or feed them to animals.  As well as being healthy for people to eat, parsley is great for animals.  Parsley leaves and stems are loved by our guinea pigs.  Our chickens also eat the parsley stems, but they much prefer the leaves.  If nothing else, the stems are good in the compost, so there is no waste. 

Over two feet tall

Look at the size of this monster

I find it odd how simple parsley is to grow, how productive and nutritious it is, yet how rarely we use parsley as a leaf vegetable.  Parsley leaves have a lot of vitamins and minerals, according to research it is very high in Calcium, Iron, Vitamin C, Vitamin K, Vitamin A.  

Just 5.5 grams of fresh parsley, which is about 1.5 tablespoons, provides the recommended daily intake of Vitamin K.  

Parsley contains 133mg Vitamin C per 100 grams, which is higher than oranges which have about 50mg per 100 grams.  

Parsley has about 138mg calcium per 100 grams, while cows milk has about 120mg calcium per 100 grams.  

Parsley contains around 6.2 milligrams of iron per 100 grams. To put this in perspective, spinach only has about 2.7mg of iron per 100 grams.  

I find it strange to think that parsley is mostly used as a garnish in this country when it has the potential to be something so much more.  It is so easy to grow and apparently very nutritious.  Each leaf of my parsley is absolutely massive, and with a little more breeding work they would get a bit larger.  

My giant parsley

Parsley this big should be more than a garnish

I used to know someone who bred rabbits for meat.  He used to feed the young rabbits parsley to increase their growth rates.  He said that parsley's high levels of calcium helped their bones grow fast so they could get up to full size quickly.  He would also feed parsley to lactating mothers to increase their milk supply and because he thought the high amounts of iron would help them recover from birthing.  I have no idea if this is true or not, but it makes sense to me.  

I wish I was growing this huge parsley back then and could have given him some seeds.  One of these giant plants has the potential to produce more leaves than a large plot of regular flat leaf parsley.  

Parsley is an underrated herb

I sell seeds of my parsley through my for sale page.  It is not a stable variety, and may produce a few regular size plants.  It will also produce a lot of extra large plants, and a few mammoth plants.  They all taste the same, just prevent the smaller plants from flowering and you will ensure that each year your plants will be large.  If you want to grow a giant parsley that is edible and will impress people, then this is for you.  

Immali corn 2023

Immali Corn is a pink/purple and white sweetcorn.  This is the first purple sweet corn developed in Australia.  For some reason we don't have many coloured sweet corns in Australia.  I bred Immali corn myself, so am biased, but I really like it.  

Immali corn is a short variety, which tillers (ie grows several stalks per plant which increases the number of cobs).  It is very sweet, and higher in antioxidants than yellow corn.  

It needs to be cooked not long after it is picked, otherwise it starts converting sugars to starch.  This means it tastes far better.  It is a great variety for backyards, and entirely unsuitable to mechanical harvest and interstate transport.  

This year I didn't grow many Immali corn plants, and didn't get to eat any.  Instead I saved all the cobs for seed.  This year, due to the weather and the soil, the cobs were smaller than usual and less were produced per plant than usual.  That is ok, they are still large enough and numerous enough.  I will fix up the soil over winter and next year's crops of all my vegetables will hopefully be back to normal.

Some interesting things happened this year in the cobs that I thought I would share.

Immali corn cobs drying

Some cobs were mostly white, with just a few coloured seeds.  When picked at the milk stage (ready to eat as sweet corn) they are white with a few blue or purple kernels.  

This is what I was aiming for when I first started to breed Immali corn.  I then decided that a higher percentage of purple was better (there are vastly more antioxidants in purple corn), so pushed the variety to have more purple.  I don't see many of these mostly white cobs.  They sure are pretty.

Immali corn - small cobs this year

Immali corn - lots of white

Some plants produced entirely purple cobs.  The colour genetics behind this is relatively simple, but I alternate white seeds and purple seeds when planting, so tend to only see cobs with a mix of white and purple.  

Finding some entirely purple cobs like this was fun and unexpected. 

Immali corn - some cobs entirely purple

Most plants produced the regular looking "Immali corn" cobs.  They have mostly purple seeds and some white seeds.  

When picked at the milk stage, the colours are lighter, and they look pink/purple and white.  It really is very pretty for a sweet corn.  When you let the cobs age and dry the colours change to darker purple like in these photos.

Immali corn ready for shucking

Immali corn - dry seeds

I started breeding Immali Corn about a dozen years ago, and it is now a stable and beautiful variety.  I have only ever grown it organically so it has adapted to become relatively resistant to pests and productive under less than ideal conditions.  One thing I love about Immali corn is that you can save seed each year and grow it again and again without ever having to buy seed a second time.

Sweet corn seed only lasts a year or two before germination drops off.  I now have plenty of fresh seeds.  If you would like to buy seeds of organically grown Immali Corn, I sell them through my for sale page.  

Segregation and culling micro woolly blue tomato project

My micro dwarf woolly blue tomato breeding project is making more progress.  There are still a few years before this project will be completed, but I think it is time for another update.  

I have written earlier blog posts on micro tomatoes, and high anthocyanin (true black) tomatoes, and woolly leaf tomatoes.  

I wrote a previous blog post on my attempt to cross a micro dwarf tomato with an angora leaf tomato, in the hopes of breeding a micro woolly tomato with blue/black fruit.  I also wrote an update on progress and the F1 plant.  

Tomato seedling - woolly foliage 

I successfully made the cross between the micro tomato and the woolly leaf high anthocyanin tomato, and I grew out an F1 plant.  I saved a lot of seed from the F1, and planted some of that seed this winter/spring.  I planted a lot of F2 seeds so that I could cull really hard and hopefully get what I am hoping for reasonably quickly.  My original goal was to produce a micro dwarf woolly leaf plant with blue/black fruit.  

The F2 seedlings will display a lot of genetic diversity.  Some were easy to cull from a very young age, while other genes won't be displayed until later so the seedlings needed growing out for longer.  

The first cull was pretty simple:  

Some plants were tall, they were culled quickly as they are easy to see from a young age.

Some plants will be dwarf, and others will be micro dwarf.  It can be difficult to tell these apart when they are seedlings.  These will be kept until they grow larger as I would hate to cull a vigorous micro dwarf.  Also if I have too few keepers I may want to keep some of these dwarf lines for back crossing and produce micro dwarfs from them.  

Out of the remaining dwarf and micro-dwarf plants the next cull was also reasonably simple:  

Some plants have regular leaf, they were quickly culled as they are simple to see from a young age.

Some plants will be heterozygous for woolly leaf and are kind of woolly, others will be homozygous for woolly genes and will have very fluffy leaf.  All of these will be grown out until later.  Again I don't want to kill off any heterozygous woolly leaf plants as I may want to keep these lines to produce true homozygous angora leaf lines.

Tomato seedlings - needs more culling

The dwarf and micro dwarf woolly leaf plants are going to be grown out until larger.  I plan to keep every micro dwarf woolly leaf tomato plant.

These may have different fruit colour, some may be red, others yellow, and I would kind of like some of each.  As well as this they could have various amounts of anthocyanin, ranging from none to very dark black.  It is difficult to tell at this young age so I will have to grow out a number of plants.

I planted dozens of seeds, and have a bit left over for another try next year if this doesn't work out.  At this stage there are several plants that appear to be micro dwarf and woolly.  I plan to keep them and hopefully save seed from them.  Even if none of them are what I am after I may be able to cross them with something that has the missing genes and eventually develop what I am wanting.

One of these F2 seedlings in particular appears to be high in anthocyanin as the leaves are displaying a high degree of purple colouration.  It is too early to know for sure, but it fills me with hope.

Several potential keepers, others need culling

While my goal was to produce a micro dwarf woolly leaf plant with blue/black fruit, I may or may not achieve that this year.  Even if I do achieve that, I still have a number of generations to grow out before the line will be stabilised.  

I am happy to say that micro tomatoes have short generational times, and I can usually get 2 or 3 generations per year (sometimes even 4).  I am also working a lot with recessive and partly recessive genes.  This means that stabilising lines of micro dwarf tomatoes may take a lot of generations, but this should hopefully be completed in a small number of years.  

Working with recessive (and partially recessive) genes also means that in the early stages when the line is not yet stable they should retain all of the traits that I want to see in each future generation.  It shows progress, which is good to help keep up the motivation to bother breeding things like this.

Things have progressed a little since I took the photos, plants have grown, I have culled more plants, there are still some unknowns, and I have a few really promising fuzzy little tomato plants.  I can hardly wait to see what these grow out to be.

At this stage I plan to grow out every micro dwarf with woolly foliage, and start a few different lines from them.  I may or may not grow out and collect seed from any of the other promising plants.  If all goes well I will have several different fruit colours in my micro woolly lines before too long.  

I really want a high anthocyanin micro woolly line, and I may be able to achieve that on both red fruit as well as yellow fruit.  Only time will tell.

Perennial corn survived winter

Last summer I grew some perennial corn Zea diploperennis.  I am very excited to say that some of my perennial corn plants survived winter and now that the weather is warming are happily growing!  

Zea diploperennis is a perennial undomesticated ancestor of our modern corn.  I am not sure if this particular species was used in breeding modern corn, or if it is just closely related to the species that were used in breeding domestic corn.  What I do know is that it crosses with modern corn and with various undomesticated teosinte corn species.  

My understanding is that perennial corn is pretty uncommon, and it is incredibly rare in Australia.  I had never grown, or even seen, perennial corn plants before so this was somewhat of an adventure and a learning curve.

The cobs from diploperennis were small and contain far fewer seeds than domestic corn.  I don't know if first year cobs are smaller than subsequent year cobs, but have a feeling that they are never large and never contain huge amounts of seed.  

All modern corn varieties are annual which is great for large scale chemical dependent monocropping.  A perennial corn would be wonderful for home growers, permaculture farming, and low input polyculture food forests.  Perennial corn plants are simple to grow and resistant to may pests and diseases that affect modern corn, which makes them useful in breeding something that is better suited to backyard growers who don't want to spray anything.  

I am told that this corn contains roughly 85% diploperennis genetics and about 15% domestic corn genetics.  Having a small percentage of domestic corn genetics should mean that this will flower around the same time as other corn varieties, making it easier to cross breed and produce a perennial popcorn or perennial dent corn.

Z diploperennis divided into two plants - red stems

I'm not sure how perennial corn would grow in a warmer climate, but where I am it dies back to rhizomes over winter.  Some plants have robust rhizomes that appear to have divided a lot, while others had weaker rhizomes that did not divide at all.

Perennial corn is not well suited to my climate, the frosts are just too harsh here.  It would be well suited to conditions with milder winters.  I was uncertain if it could survive winter here but I did not want to grow it from seed each year and have yet another perennial vegetable that I treat as an annual.

To give it the best chance of surviving I grew it in pots which I moved to an unheated greenhouse over winter.  This meant that it was still very cold, but the soil would not freeze.  I learned a lot from this, and by in large it was successful.  I believe that this would probably survive in the field if it was mulched.

Zea diploperennis divided into two - green stems

Some plants did not survive the winter.  These were no great loss, they were not cold tolerant and did not contain the genes required to build a perennial corn landrace that could stand up in my climate.  

A few plants survived and started to sprout in spring, then were eaten by slaters and the plant died.  This is regrettable as the plants were good and would probably survive in the field if mulched well.  They clearly had some of the required genetics and their loss represents a loss of diversity that may have been useful in some other genetic combination.  They did not divide enough, which meant that they only had one growing point and they died once this had been eaten by pests. 

Some plants divided a little, as can be seen in the above pictures they had two growing points that had not been killed by pests.  As can be seen above there is considerable diversity among these survivors.  Some have green stems, others have more red on the stems.  This diversity carries over the the colour of the seeds and cobs and is likely present in all of their genetics.  

Perennial corn flowering 

Genetic diversity is great as it means we should be able to cross things and hopefully end up with the right combination of genetics.  One of my plants started to flower as it was breaking dormancy.  We will see if anything comes of that flower and if that plant is worth keeping.

You may be able to tell in the photos, but I did not remove the previous year growth.  This was partly because the leaves stayed green and alive for much of winter, and partly because I thought they would help protect the growing points slightly.  Now that they are actively growing again it is time to remove the old growth.

Zea diploperennis dividing into many plants

One of my plants divided into several plants, I am not sure how many but it is a decent number.  This plant also had several stalks in its first year, and was the only of my plants to do this.  This is a trait that I want to keep when I try to breed perennial popcorn.  

I certainly don't want to reduce genetic diversity in the population at this stage so will not be only breeding from this dividing plant.  Given that it does produce multiple stems I assume it will produce a lot of pollen and will likely incorporate its genes into a lot of the seeds produced by my plants.

From careful poking around in the soil it appears that this plant produced several rhizomes which probably could have been split off from one another and transplanted.  These second year plants are certainly larger than seed grown at this stage, (especially considering that I have not yet planted corn seed for the year) so it will be interesting to see if they are more productive than first year plants.

Even if I never successfully cross this with modern corn this vigorously dividing trait would still be useful and highly desirable.  Even if I simply breed a population of dividing plants they can be used similar to other cereals such as wheat o oats, but with much larger seeds that are more nutritious and are far simpler to thresh at home.

Zea diploperennis cob

I have not divided anything yet as I have so few plants to play with and would hate to accidentally kill one.  Instead I am leaving all of these surviving plants as they are to see how they perform in their second year and hopefully produce far more cobs per plant.  

As you can see in the photo, the first year cobs were tiny.  I have a feeling that they could double or triple this size.  In other words I think that they will always be really small unless it is crossed with domestic corn.

Zea diploperennis cob size

I wonder if a clumping plant like this would be more productive or less work than a plant with a single stem as it may produce numerous little cobs.  It would be nice to be able to plant a perennial corn rhizome and then leave it to form an expanding clump that was increasingly productive each year.  The only way for me to find out if this is possible is for me to leave it and see what happens.

This year I don't have any spare plants or seed to share.  Hopefully all goes well and in autumn I will have spare seed and hopefully even some rhizome divisions from my more vigorous plants.  

If you are in Australia and interested in growing perennial corn feel free to get in touch with me around autumn/winter to see if I have any seeds to spare.  You can either leave a comment below or my contact details can be found on my for sale page.