Winner of the Flower Blog Award 2018

Recently I received an email from someone who claimed to work for Sparpeia.ch offering to nominate my blog for the "Flower Blog Awards 2018".

It was a blog competition, they had 10 blogs for people to vote for, and they offered to make mudflower the eleventh blog in the competition.

I had not heard of them before, and I never click on links that are emailed to me, so I googled them.  I found the following description of sparpedia.ch

• Online Shopping, Discount Store, Vouchers, Our mission is to provide all Swiss with the latest and best offers of all online shops in Switzerland.

They are located in Switzerland.  That seemed odd.  Would my blog really be good enough to be nominated for an international flower blog award?

I did some more googling and it all appeared legitimate, so I replied to the email and agreed to be nominated.  It felt like the competition had been running for some time prior to my inclusion as there was less than a week left until voting closed.

I had a look at the other blogs in the competition, and they were all really amazing blogs, so I was delighted that my blog was considered worthy to compete with such high quality blogs.

It was a great honour to be nominated for an international flower blog competition!  Even if I didn't get a lot of votes this would still be a great experience and I was really excited to be part of it. 

If you voted for me in Flower Blog Awards 2018 thank you, I really appreciate it. 

The voting progressed and at the end the most amazing thing happened, I won!  My blog won the Flower Blog Awards 2018.  Seriously, I really won!  This blog got 40% of the votes.  Second and third place each got 7% of the votes.

Wow, I honestly wasn't expecting that.  

They emailed me the HTML for a cool little badge thingy to put on my blog (it is over on the right hand side somewhere) and sent me some prize money that was kindly provided by their sponsors Ricardo, Easyjet, Swisscom, and Autoscout24.

It isn't every day you win Switzerland's flower blog award! Thank you Sparpedia for allowing me to be part of this, and thank you to the sponsors who made this all possible.

Marshall's Bananaphone Pea

This past year I grew a rare variety of pea named Marshall’s bananaphone. What an amazing name! I grew them in the hope of building up seed numbers and distributing them.  Unfortunately it didn’t really work out that way.

The birds decided they were going to dig up and eat most of my pea seed, so I didn't get many more seeds from any variety that I planted this year. Marshall’s banana phone is no exception to this. I protected a few plants, but nowhere near as many as I planted.

To top this off, every time I looked away the kids would eat a few more of them. As I couldn’t increase the seed numbers significantly I thought I would write a description of this variety of yellow podded shelling pea.

Marshall's Bananaphone not yet ripe

Massive Leaf Parsley

Last year I tried to do a bit more wide plant breeding.  I have a few things I am trying that may or may not be worth doing, but it is fun learning.  I seem to be achieving a few things that people say are impossible, as well as other things that it appears that have never been attempted.

One thing I attempted to do was cross members of the Apiaceae family.  Crossing Apiaceae is fiddly and time consuming at the best of times.  So my success rate is low and my confidence levels that I have made the cross I had hoped for is even lower.

Then I grew the most remarkable plant.

My mystery seedling

I attempted to cross skirret and parsley.  I had many hundreds of parsley seeds germinate, as well as many skirret seeds.  As well as those seedlings a mystery seedling grew.

When it was tiny it looked a lot like skirret but something was different.  I like skirret, and I like plants that grow from seed by themselves, so I decided to leave it to grow.  Who knows, it could turn out to be something special?

After the plant grew larger, the leaves looked different from skirret.  It didn't look like anything else I am growing either.  The leaves kind of looked a bit like parsley. But not flat leaf parsley, and not curly leaf parsley.  Each leaflet had rounded lobes.

mystery plant - possibly skirret x parsley hybrid

Skirret and parsley are both in the Apiaceae family so crossing is not entirely out of the question.  Skirret is Sium sisarum, while parsley is Petroselinum crispum.  Wide crosses between different genus is very uncommon, but not always impossible. 

There is very little information on skirret on the internet so it is not surprising that I can not find any reference to any skirret hybrids at all.  It is too bad, skirret deserves to be grown more and understood better.

I found reference to a few parsley x celery hybrids and a parsley x carrot hybrid that was achieved using protoplast fusion.  I read one study where parsley and celeriac were cross pollinated, only  three seeds out of 1,000 were hybrids and the others were not. 

It appears that some hybrids within Apiaceae are possible, but very unlikely.  So it is a good thing I planted (and accidentally dropped) so many seeds!

Parsley leaves at top and middle, skirret leaves lower

The leaves of my mystery plant do not look like parsley or skirret leaves.  The mystery plant's leaves have rounded lobes, while parsley tend to have pointy lobes.  Skirret leaves tend to show a bit of diversity and can be pointy or rounded.  The mystery plant's leaves each grew five leaflets, each of which were about the size of the palm of my hand.  I am not yet certain, but this is either a hybrid, or a remarkable massive leaf parsley.

As it started to flower the leaflets became more pointed and thinner, eventually resembling fatter flat leaf parsley leaves. 

The leaves taste and smell like parsley

The leaf petioles of skirret tend to be almost round in cross section, while the petioles of parsley often are not.  Most parsley tends to have crescent moon like shape in cross section, like a tiny version of celery.  That being said, I do have a few parsley plants with petioles that are almost round.  The leaf petioles of my mystery plant are almost round, resembling skirret petioles.

My skirret often grows a small leaf from the where the base of a larger leaf  joins the plant.  This mystery plant is also demonstrating this behaviour.  Oddly enough, some of my parsley do this while most others don't.  This small leaf became a growing point that eventually put up up flowers.

The base of each leaf became a growing point that eventually sent up flowers

Some of my skirret have purple petioles while others have green.  I don't know if this is due to environmental factors or if it is purely genetic.  Parsley has green or white petioles. The mystery plant has green petioles.

I have not dug up the plant so do not know what the roots look like.  I am very tempted to dig and have a look, but fear that will not end well for my little plant.

The leaves are fascinating

Skirret is a perennial plant that flowers in its first year when grown from seed and goes dormant over winter.  Most parsley is biennial only flowering in its second year, after which it dies.  If parsley flowers in its first year it tends to be due to stress, and the plant is small and weak.  Parsley does not go dormant over winter in my climate.

My mystery plant is currently flowering in its first year.  The flowers are small and unremarkable, much like the flowers on any Apiaceae, but closely resembling parsley flowers more than skirret flowers.  Both my skirret and my parsley are flowering at the same time too.  I do not know if my mystery plant will die after flowering, if it survives I don't know if it will go dormant over winter.

It is widely documented that in parsley is diploid and 2n = 22.  Bell (1966) states that skirret is diploid and 2n = 22, which would mean that a hybrid between the two could possibly be fertile and may be able to set viable seed.

Unfortunately, several other sources contain conflicting information and state that in skirret is diploid and 2n = 20.  If this is the case then this hybrid will likely be sterile and none of its seeds will be viable.  I have no way to determine ploidy levels at home, so will have to wait and see what happens.  

At this stage the seeds appear to be forming normally, so I would be surprised if they are not viable.

Parsley usually reaches about 2 to 3 feet tall.  Look at the size of this monster!

At this stage it was 157 cm tall, it got much taller than this

If this plant is an intergeneric skirret x parsley hybrid, it will be the first one to have ever been grown and should be resistant to almost every disease that bothers parsley.  If this plant is just parsley, then it is the most remarkable parsley I have seen.

This plant may be fertile and produce viable seeds, or it may be infertile and none of the seeds will germinate.  This plant may be perennial and produce offsets like skirret, or it may be annual and die after flowering.  If it is infertile and annual then this will be possibly the first and only intergeneric skirret hybrid to ever be grown. 

Hopefully this plant proves to be fertile and I can save viable seed.  I would really love to grow the F2 seeds and see what they are like.  Hybrid or not, I would love to stabilise a massive leaf parsley.

I can hardly wait to see what happens.  I plan to write another blog post after the seeds have been planted and I know more.

Strawberry x Raspberry intergeneric hybrid berry taste

Earlier I wrote a post on strawberry x raspberry hybrid experiment update, now it is time for a description of the berries (botanically they are not berries, but let's move on).

I tried to think of how to describe the taste of these berries, saying "they are really delicious", or "I like them", probably isn’t all that useful to anyone.  So I thought hard about how to describe the taste of strawberry x raspberry hybrid berries.

To me they are sour, but not in a bad way, and certainly not as sour as store bought strawberries or raspberries.  They taste like strawberry mixed with something tropical.  They taste warm (is warm a taste) and floral (is floral a taste) and really nice.  They are very fragrant, the smell is delicious and similar to the taste.  The fragrance is like strawberry mixed with something tropical.  That is the best description I can come up with.

I asked someone else to describe their taste, and was given the following elaborate and rather fancy description.

• They taste sour and warm with a delicately intense combination of wild strawberries, apricots, bananas, and raspberries. They have the unmistakable heavenly scent of a lolly shop.

Wow, I don't know what to say.  I guess they are far better at words than I am.

I asked someone else to describe the taste and was told:

• are AMAZING!!!!!!!! They’re little flavour explosions!  So YUMMY!!!! 

Than when I asked for a better description was told:

• Booom!

I guess the taste of strawberry x raspberry hybrid berries inspires the overuse of exclamation marks and capitalisation?  In all seriousness, they do taste sensational and unlike anything else I have eaten, so their taste causing a lot of excitement is understandable.

The texture of strawberry x raspberry hybrid berries is different from that of either parent.  Perhaps something akin to a ripe pear, but without any grittiness that pears often have. 

The hybrid berries all look similar to strawberries.  They have achenes (the true fruits that most people refer to as 'seeds') on the outside of a fleshy receptacle.  These achenes are barely attached to the receptacle, and I wonder if they would fall off from the lightest hint of a breeze, yet somehow they stay attached.  The skin and achenes are red, and the flesh is white all the way through.

They are vaguely strawberry shaped, but all of them are odd looking, lumpy, bumpy, and bulbous.  They all have irregular bumps, some are curved, in some the end is slightly forked, or the berry is twisted, some are short and fat while others are elongated.  The weird shapes do not appear to have been caused from issues with pollination.

At this stage I don't know if they are self-pollinating, or if they are being pollinated by strawberry or raspberry plants growing near by.  I don't know if any of these seeds are viable and will grow.  I have many breeding experiments I want to try with this hybrid and will try to write more blog posts as I discover more.

All the following images are of strawberry x raspberry hybrid fruit off the same plant.

Strawberry x raspberry hybrid fruit, has lumps and the end is slightly forked

Strawberry x raspberry hybrid, note the base is bulbous

Strawberry x raspberry hybrid, note the irregular shape and the leaf arising from the calyx

Strawberry x raspberry hybrid, berries are all irregular

Strawberry x raspberry hybrid berry

Strawberry x raspberry hybrid

Edit to add: I sent samples of these plants to the CSIRO who tested them and determined that they are true intergeneric strawberry raspberry hybrids.  The results can be seen here.

 

Strawberry x Raspberry Hybrid Experiment Update

It is time for an update on my strawberry x raspberry hybrid experiment. 

Strawberry x Raspberry hybrid semi double flower (it is missing a petal)

Are roosters edible

Recently when I have had a few conversations with people, often they are self-confessed "foodies", and I have mentioned that we used to eat our extra roosters.  They are bewildered and ask if you can even eat rooster.  Then, before there is time to reply, they often smugly comment in an all knowing tone that they would never do such a thing as the meat would be tough and bad tasting. 

Of course you can eat rooster.  If you eat meat then you can eat most animals as they are made from meat.   Strangely these foodies have all eaten rooster many times, but they didn’t know they ate it as they simply don’t know where food comes from.

When you go to 'woollies' and pick up a roast chook, or go to a fancy restaurant and order an over priced meal containing chicken, if you are in Australia it is probably the meat of a young rooster about half of the time.

Currently, around half of any chicken meat you can buy in Australia is from roosters (albeit they are very young), but this is a relatively new thing.  Allow me to explain this further.

Blue australorp rooster - massive and calm

In the ‘old days’ most families had a small flock of dual purpose pure bred chickens.   The hens would lay eggs and extra roosters would be fed to the family.   Often you can't have many roosters as they will fight and hurt one another.  Roosters were usually killed reasonably young, about 4 to 6 months old.  When hens got too old to lay well, or the breeding rooster stopped doing his job well, they would be made into soup.  This was seen as normal, everyone who ate 'chicken' mostly ate roosters.

Slowly house block sizes got so small that a self-sustaining flock of chickens were no longer feasible for most families so people turned to shops to provide them with chicken meat and eggs.   This helped to detach people from their food, it lead to the extinction of many great breeds of chicken, and it lead to many breeds being bred for show and losing their usefulness, but that is a story for another time.

Silkie rooster ready for cooking

When I was young the egg farms mostly had pure bred birds, often leghorns as they lay more eggs on less feed than any other breed that I am aware of, but later they were often australorps as consumers wanted brown eggs instead of white.  They are lovely birds that do not do well confined in battery cages, and it is difficult to accurately tell the gender of hatchlings.  This lowers profits as more space and more food is used.   Often males and females were grown out for a few weeks to be certain before culling the males.   As money had been spent on feed the males were not wasted, the females would be placed in cages to lay eggs and the males would be grown out in separate sheds and slaughtered for meat.   Back then, almost all of the chicken meat you could buy was from young roosters as the females were used for eggs.  This was considered normal, everyone who ate 'chicken' mostly ate roosters.

In the 1960’s a first cross meat chicken was developed overseas.  It was fast growing and had a great feed conversion ratio.  As they are slaughtered before reaching maturity they were not kept for eggs, meaning both males and females would be killed and eaten.  These meat birds grow so fast that if they are not slaughtered at a young age they often experience all kinds of health issues.  I know a few people who tried to use them to breed from and they said that the roosters sometimes get so large that their legs would break under their own weight.  This cross breed struggled to be widely accepted in Australia in the early days as farming was less specialised back then and the egg industry had to do something with all the extra males.

Some cross bred chickens that we used to own

Around 1978 a French company developed a first cross laying hybrid where the females are red/brown and the males are white, they don’t eat a lot and laid well when confined in battery cages.  They are thin so don't have a lot of meat, but they lay well when confined and fed consistent rations.

This changed everything.  From then on it was simple to tell at hatching which were males and which were females as soon as they hatched.  Females could be kept for eggs while males could be buried alive, or fed through a wood chipper, or otherwise dispatched at day old in whatever way that is deemed acceptable by the RSPCA.  It took many years for these crossbred layers to become popular in Australia, now they dominate the egg industry and are probably the most popular back yard chicken.

The development of a sex linked layer also meant that a first cross meat breed could dominate the chicken broiler market.  This meat cross that was developed in the 1960’s before I was born now dominates the broiler industry in Australia today.  They grow fast and can reach marketable size (which is rather tiny) in about 6 to 8 weeks. 

Both males and females are now grown out and slaughtered for meat, which means about half of the chicken meat you can buy is now from a rooster.  Now this is seen as normal, everyone in Australia who eats chicken meat also eats roosters, but they usually don’t know it.

It will be a young rooster, but you can’t tell the difference in meat between that and a pullet, and I don’t know of anyone who even claims to be able to tell the difference.   If anyone would pretend to be able to tell it would be foodies, yet all the foodies I know have no idea that rooster is even edible!

Now, before someone petty tries to point out that young roosters are sometimes called 'cockerels' in some places - I know.  Cockerel is sometimes the name for a rooster under about one year of age.  This is a pedantic difference as it a regional dialect that differs depending on where you live.  Some places use the words cockerel and rooster interchangeably.  Regardless, a young rooster is still a rooster.  If someone is asking if roosters are edible they are always referring to young roosters.  Old roosters make a decent soup, just like an old hen makes a decent soup, so they are still edible.

The answer remains the same: If you eat meat, then yes you can eat a rooster.

Some other poultry terms that appear to confuse the foodies I know:

Capon
A 'capon' is a young rooster that has been castrated.  Roosters are very rarely castrated in Australia so you will not find these in many places.

Spatchcock
A 'spatchcock' is just a bird (normally a young pullet or rooster but sometimes various game birds) that has been splayed open for grilling.

Squab
A 'squab' is a young pigeon.  They are normally under 4 weeks of age.

If I think of any other terms that are confusing I will try to list them here.

Bee Forage Map

A while ago I found a bee forage map.  You can drag it to your address, change between miles and kilometers, zoom in and out, change between map or satellite view, and it shows how far bees may fly to forage.

I did not make this map, but I like it.  I will likely forget where it is, so I am linking to it here so I will be able to find it again: https://www.beepods.com/honey-bee-forage-map-radius-diameter-hive-coverage-plants-range.html

Honey bees will fly the shortest distance possible to collect nectar, pollen, water and propolis.  Where possible they will only fly a few meters from their hive and never leave your property.  In spring, when fruit trees are covered in flowers and the lawn is full of blooming dandelion and clover, I doubt my bees would need to even fly over my fence. 

At that time of year there are far more flowers than bees.  Much like it says in Luke 10:2 "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few".

Apple blossom is great in spring

Unfortunately, this changes pretty quickly and my bees need to travel further.  Most of the year the average property will lack enough resources to sustain a healthy hive, so foraging a lot further will be required.  When resources are low, if the hive is strong enough, the bees can fly 10 to 15 km or more.

People get caught up with numbers, but the closer they are to resources the better.  Many people say that most bee foraging occurs within 3 km of the hive.  This may be true, but if resources are closer they will collect them first.  So I look at the 1 km circle to see what is near my place. 

When I look at the bee forage map and zoom in to my place, within 1 km there is part of town with many established gardens, there are fruit trees, willow trees, poplar trees, acacia trees, honey locust trees, silk trees etc, there are many vegetable gardens, there are flowering hedges, there is open grazing land and crop land, there are overgrown yards filled with flowering weeds, there are roadside weeds, there are native flowers and trees, there are vineyards and canola fields (I am not happy about the last two, but there is nothing I can do about them).  All of this means there are a lot of floral resources near by for bees to collect. 

Within 1km of my place there is also a meadery, which has many bee hives.  There are also a reasonable number of backyard beekeepers within 1 km of my place.  Meaning there is a lot of competition for the resources that are here. 

At times there are far too many hives for the resources in the area, which leads to robbing.  I hate to think how much damage this is doing to the native bee population in the area.

I like this map, it showed me just how close I was to so many things both good and bad.  I was far closer than I had realised.

My vegetable garden has many resources, all within 30 m of the hive

Kumato tomato review

Have you ever heard about kumato tomatoes? For years I have heard how amazing these tomatoes taste and how very sweet they are. I read quotes such as “Kumato, the most delicious commercial tomato on the market”.

I was skeptical that a supermarket tomato could actually taste good, but so many reviews couldn’t be that far wrong – or could they?

Many brown tomatoes do have complex and rich taste, delicious varieties such as ‘black cherry’ and ‘Japanese black trifele’ immediately spring to mind, so I had high hopes for kumato. Others such as Black Russian are pretty bland, so kumato really could go either way. I cut into the kumato and it looked nice inside, which got my hopes up.

Kumato certainly look very good. If the marketing is to be believed I may even be able to buy a decent tomato from the supermarket rather than growing it myself. Imagine the garden space that would free up for other things. So I tried some to see for myself.

Kumato photo by Achim Raschka https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=5550820

When I tasted it I was disappointed, it was mealy and insipid. It was much like any supermarket tomato except perhaps a little less sour and with far less flavour. That’s right, the kumato I ate had less flavour than a supermarket tomato.

I grow some varieties of very sweet tomatoes which I love, and I grow some very sour tomatoes which I adore, so am not new to sweet tomatoes or sour tomatoes. Unfortunately kumato was neither sweet nor sour, and it lacked any depth or complexity of taste.

Kumato wasn’t horrible, I didn’t want to spit it out, it didn’t make me gag or anything extreme like that, but it was not enjoyable. Salt helps bring out the flavour of some tomatoes, perhaps it needs salt. I added salt to see if that helped, but it didn’t. Then it was just salty and bland.

I grow a lot of varieties of tomato, some very old heirlooms, others are very new varieties, plus I dabble in breeding new tomato varieties, so my kids have tasted many dozens of different varieties of tomatoes in their short lives. They each have their favourites, and they tend to agree on the ones they don’t like. They know the brown tomatoes tend to have rich taste and were excited to try a kumato. When eating one each of them had a similar reaction, they were surprised at how bland kumato tomatoes are. How disappointing. Kids love tomatoes so I had hoped at least one of the kids would enjoy them, but they didn’t.

Japanese Black Trifele tomato - I love how these taste

I thought we may have gotten a bad batch, so I have tried kumato a few different times, and each time the result has been bland. I tried some that were firmer, and others that were far riper, each time the same result. We also tried ‘mini kumato’, which taste just as bland as kumato only smaller.

When tomatoes are put in the fridge they tend to lose flavour, some varieties are worse than others at this. All supermarkets tomatoes have been through cold storage before I get to buy them. Perhaps kumato could be decent tasting when ripe but responds very poorly to cold storage? I guess I will never know as I have no way to ever try a fresh one that has not been refrigerated. If that is the case this would be a dreadful trait for a commercially produced variety to have!

I don’t know why kumato have such great reviews, I suspect many people have never eaten a good tomato so have nothing to compare them against. I found them so bland I would prefer one of the unnamed red round supermarket tomatoes to a kumato. While those unnamed red round supermarket tomatoes certainly don’t taste great, they at least have more flavour than a kumato.

Black Russian tomato - sure looks pretty

After eating kumato several different times I read a description on Wikipedia which says they are “varying in flavor from almost no flavor to sweeter than typical tomatoes”. Kumato having almost no flavour sounds like my experiences with them and unfortunately it seems as though this is pretty common.

One of the biggest problems with growing food is that I have eaten good tasting food. If I had never eaten a good tomato perhaps I could convince myself that kumato taste ok simply because they lack sourness?

It looks like if I want a good tasting tomato I still have to grow it myself. I sell a few different types of tomato seeds, but kumato will never be on that list, if you are interested have a look at my for sale page.

The amazing V1-X

A few months ago my eldest son was given a toy for his birthday.  It was one of those things where you look after a fake pet.  It was a version of what I think they used to call a Tamagotchi or something like that.  I don't see the point, but he seemed to enjoy it and the other kids all wanted one themselves.

My second son desperately wanted one, but didn't want to wait until his birthday.  He asked for one, and we told him to wait until his birthday, he didn't want to miss out on the fun so he made his own.

He decided it needed a name, so he called it a "V1-X".

The amazing V1-X

V1X ready to play

He got a small box, put a toy car in it, and shook is left and right, and up and down.  Hours of fun!

I am not sure what the rules are, but he got high scores often.

I gave it a go, apparently I wasn't as good and I lost a life somehow?  I was told that my scores were pretty low.  It was really quite amusing playing with the V1-X and being told I lost a life.

Apparently if you get over a certain score, or something, you get an upgrade.  To be honest, I was never sure if an upgrade was a good thing or a bad thing.  It didn't really matter, my scores were never high enough to earn an upgrade.

An upgrade meant there were two toys to shake around in the box.  Again, I was never quite sure what the rules were.

V1-X upgrade

V1-X with various upgrades

Finally his birthday arrived and he got a real Tamagotchi thing.  He played with it a bit, but the novelty wore off pretty fast.  I assume it is still in his room somewhere but I haven't seen him use it in a long time.

I am not sure if he had more fun with the tamagotchi, or his V1-X.  He certainly got more use out of the V1-X and spent longer playing with it.

Sometimes my kids make me laugh.

Interesting strawberry leaves

I have been growing strawberries for years.  Normally the leaves all look much the same.  Sometimes they are larger or smaller, or more jagged or smoother, but really they all look much the same.  There are a few 'yellow leaf' forms, but to me they look like a sickly green.

Sometimes, my strawberries grow interesting leaves.  I have also been tinkering with breeding strawberries, sometimes a few interesting things come out of the crosses.  Crossing appears to introduce instability, which isn't always a bad thing.

I have had a few strawberry plants that sometimes throw up variegated leaves.  I had hoped this trait would continue and I would have a line of variegated plants, so far it is always restricted to a single leaf.  Hopefully in the future this variegation happens to a runner, then I may be able to grow variegated strawberry plants.

Variegated strawberry leaf

Variegated leaf

I have also had a few leaves with four or five leaflets instead of the usual three.  I really like this trait, but it does seem to be restricted to single leaves instead of entire plants.

Some plants tend to display this trait more often than others, it is more common in the wide crosses, but as yet I do not have any plants I consider to consistently grow four or five leaflets instead of the usual three.

Five leaflets instead of three.

Four leaflets instead of three

Five leaflets on the left, I don't know how many on the right

Five leaflets

If you have strawberries that grow interesting leaves and are willing to send me a plant or some seeds let me know.  I would be keen to grow them.

Currently strawberry seeds are still legal to import into Australia.  I know there is at least one variety of variegated strawberry around but don't know if it grows variegated from seed.

I do sell some strawberry plants through my for sale page.  Unfortunately at the moment I can't guarantee that any will ever grow interesting leaves like this.

Thyme progress

For some reason it is difficult to find many named varieties of thyme in Australia.  For some reason it is almost impossible to find any comparisons of thyme varieties.  Plant nurseries write such lovely things about their plants, but an honest side by side comparison is practically unheard of.

Last year I wrote a post comparing some thyme varieties to highlight the differences between them.  To expand on that, below are comparative pictures of the growth after about 6 months.  The pictures were taken at the beginning of spring after the plants had survived winter.

I wish I had planted them further apart, but I needed the space so they are cramped together.  The small pots contain cuttings of each variety.  You can see how each of the varieties of thyme grew compared to the others.  They are probably each double that size now and have started to flower.

Four varieties of thyme growing side by side.  It is pretty obvious that Jekka's thyme is larger and stronger than the other varieties.  It goes outside of the picture to the left somewhat.

Left to right: Jekka's thyme, Tabor thyme, Variegated lemon thyme, Orange peel thyme

Grow more dandelions

I like dandelions (Taraxacum officinale).  They are a perennial edible plant that are easy to grow.  I allow them to flower and set seed in my yard and encourage them as best I can.

Dandelions have many uses.  People eat the nutritious leaves and roots, they are high in vitamins minerals and inulin, nice coffee substitute can be made from the roots, wine can apparently be made from the flowers, animals relish all parts, bees (both native bees and honey bees) and other pollinators just adore them, they have medical uses, and they can be useful in composts.  Dandelions flower for much of the year where I live now, which is great for bees and other pollinators.

If you look closely you may notice that every photo on this page of dandelion flowers has a honey bee somewhere in the picture.  Bees really seem to love dandelions.

Dandelions have many uses, they grow reasonably fast, they are reasonably productive, they have no real problems with pests or diseases, and they can just grow in my lawn so do not use space that is needed for other vegetables.

I don’t see what is not to like and I like to encourage people to grow dandelions in the lawn.

Dandelion - you should grow more of them!

I have never understood why anyone would want to get rid of dandelions from the lawn or why dandelion poison exists.  The only problem I can think of is that they don’t survive if it is hot or dry.  That is no real reason to poison them though.

I have read permaculture sites and gardening books who claim that 'dandelions are a gift from nature that freely grow everywhere and thrive in damp as well as dry places'.  Even though I wish this were true, this is not the case.

Overwintering diploid potatoes

Last year I grew some diploid potatoes from true potato seed.  I really enjoyed it.  Every single plant produced different potatoes.  Each of them tasted far superior to anything you can get from the markets.  They were quite remarkable.

Unfortunately these diploid potatoes lack any real dormancy and start to grow not long after producing tubers, so it was unlikely that they would survive winter without help.

Being seed grown meant that each plant was unique, and I would love to keep the best new varieties alive.  Unfortunately I lack the time and space required to grow them via tissue culture, which means I had to think of a way to keep them alive through winter.

I attempted three methods of overwintering potatoes, putting them in the crisper of the fridge, leaving them in the garden, and putting them in a pot in a protected position.  Read more and I will explain what worked for me and what didn't.

Diploid potato grown from True Potato Seed

mulberry tree time from planting cuttings to fruiting

Have you ever wondered how long it takes for a white mulberry to go from a small cutting until it is large enough to fruit?  I have grown cuttings a few times so thought I would share my experiences and hope that it helps someone.

I have looked on the internet and found a nursery overseas that claims they sell 2 year old plants that should fruit in 2 - 3 years.  That seems overly long to me.  Judging how quickly I get things to fruit from cuttings or seed grown and how much longer they claim it takes for 2 year old plants to fruit I would have doubts over the quality of their plants and/or the accuracy of their claims.

Large mulberry cuttings can fruit that same year, but what about small cuttings?  Obviously it varies from plant to plant, some will fruit much faster or slower than others, and the climate will change things.

Here are some photos of a cutting that I took of a cutting from a white mulberry that is meant to be white fruiting (most white mulberries are dark fruited).  The cutting was around 10cm long and far thinner than a pencil.

My little cutting went from this tiny cutting just sprouting roots September 2017:

to this small ~60cm tall tree just before going dormant:

to this little tree emerging from dormancy in October 2018:

Unless something goes wrong I should find out in a month or two if it is white fruited or dark fruited. 

Mulberry breaking dormancy - note the catkin emerging

Almost every node that is producing leaves is also producing catkins, each of which should turn into mulberries.

It appears that this will be a productive tree once I plant it in the soil.  I am hoping that it will be white fruited, but even if it is dark fruited I think it will still be well worth growing.

 

I am waiting until the fruit ripens before planting this tree in a larger pot or in the soil.  I would hate for transplant stress to cause it to abort its fruit and have to wait another year.

I am assuming that some varieties of white mulberry take longer than this to fruit.  I assume that some varieties will be more productive and others less productive than this one.  Regardless, it appears that this is a productive and reasonably fast growing variety.  Going from a cutting to a fruiting tree in a year is pretty impressive.  I don't know of many fruit trees other than mulberry that can do this.

Skirret in Australia

Skirret (Sium Sisarum) is the ultimate perennial vegetable.  As far as I am concerned skirret is the perfect vegetable for organic gardeners, permaculture gardeners, people who are into increasing self-sufficiency, people who are increasing their food security, and people with fussy children.   That’s right, even fussy kids will eat skirret.

Skirret has a long history as a vegetable, it has been blessed with the highest recommendation and cursed with the lowest popularity of any of the root crops.  It grows wild across Asia, and has been well established across Europe.  Skirret may have made its first documented appearance in a 1322 list of seeds maintained by the gardener for the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lambeth Palace, which included a penny's worth of skirret in a 1321 to 1322 inventory.  We don't know how long it was used as a vegetable prior to this, it is believed that skirret grew along damp riversides and ditches and was easily harvested for free, so didn't need to be bought and sold.  It is likely that skirret was grown and eaten long before this but simply not recorded.

People keep telling me that there is no skirret in Australia, but I grow skirret, I sell skirret, and eat skirret.  I have given skirret to some people who now also sell it.  So skirret is slowly becoming less rare in Australia.  Hopefully one day I will see skirret for sale at a farmer's market.

I adore skirret, I have grown it for a number of years now, have written a few posts on it to try and show other people how to grow it.  Skirret is the most delicious roast vegetable ever.  I have never eaten anything that even comes close to how great skirret tastes.  I like the taste normally, but frosts make it far sweeter.  I want to encourage more people to grow this remarkable vegetable.

Skirret next to 30 cm ruler for scale

Skirret next to 30 cm ruler for scale