PERMABREED

 Mulching fruit trees           I have a lot of hay that i can use and since the soil here is rather poor i decided to try and heavily mulch my fruit trees with hay. I mulched a mirabelle tree that had been growing poorly with a massive amount of hay last year. I weeded all around the tree, cut off all the dead branches, put down old farm manure, sprinkled ground volcanic rock ash and laid down a heavy hay mulch of 40 cm thickness around the tree.  Mirabelle tree with heavy hay mulch one year later. The mirabelle tree putting out large shoots of new growth after having grown poorly for several years. It has clearly benefited of the weeding, fertilizing and mulching.   Queen Victoria plum with lots of hay mulch. Cox Orange apple weeded and mulched with hay. Sorbomespilus Dessertnaja weeded and mulched with hay. Since i had such good results with the mirabelle tree, i tried the same, even just with weeding and hay-mulching, on other trees. I li...

 Figs              I am growing 10 different fig varieties now in order to see which ones perform best here. This is the first step that i need to do to grow figs successfully. Once i found the varieties that grow best for me here i can try and grow fig trees from seeds of my best varieties. This is quite complicated. There is male and female fig trees. The fig trees that make edible figs in cooler climates such as ours belong to a type of female fig that makes parthenocarpic fruits. These trees will make figs without them having to be pollinated. In order to get seeds from my best trees i will then need to find a male fig tree. I tried to research fig pollination and from what i found i need to find a persistent caprifig tree to get the male pollen from, because only a persistent caprifig will be able to produce female parthenocarpic offspring. So once i singled out my best varieties i need to find a persistent male caprifig and then i can try my...

Resurrecting the old brussels sprouts I will start to breed brussels sprouts next year. I will begin by growing several open pollinated varieties together and let them cross freely. There is something about brussels sprouts that not many people know. I was in germany and i visited Ludwig Watschong, who has sadly passed away, and we walked through his garden. He showed me all kinds of amazing vegetables and he told me that in the past the old varieties of brussels sprouts used to ripen from the bottom up the stalk gradually. This trait was bred out of them because market farmers wanted to be able to harvest all sprouts in one patch of field to be then able to clear the field and plant something else. Having brussels sprouts over a longer period of time was achieved by planting early, mid-season and late-ripening varieties. I don't know when all this happened or much else about all this. But Ludwig said, and this is obvious, that it makes way more sense for the backyard gardener or t...

 Dwarf Beech  Here are some pictures of some of my dwarf beech seedlings. In winter when the leaves have mostly fallen off their shape is much better visible. Notice the double-buds at the end of the twigs. Normal beech trees don't have double-buds but dwarf beeches sometimes do. Young dwarf beech with most of its branches growing horizontally. The tree is already wider than it is high. Twisted trunk of a small dwarf beech seedling.   This plant while first growing to the left then has all its branches growing in the same direction as if attracted by some invisible force.

 Chilean Hazelnut   the chilean hazelnut (gevuina avellana) is an evergreen tree growing up to 20 meters tall. It's a beautiful tree that makes edible nuts that are highly esteemed in chile. Its branches can be very useful to florists since they keep for a long time and the flowers are pretty. I met Klaus Speicher, a german man who was living here in brittany and who had travelled to south america and brought back seeds. He had several gevuina trees growing at his place and ended up giving me a crate of seedlings. Gevuina is not an easy tree to grow and often when young they can just die for no apparent reason. They like moisture and the gulf stream climate with cool summers and mild winters suits them well. They are surprisingly cold-hardy and will survive up to minus 10 degrees celsius. I have 6 trees left from the seedlings i was given. These seedlings have been grown from a tree in Klaus' garden that made seeds for him so it is the second generation of gevuina growing...

 Potato Onions   For next year i have a lot of PO varieties and i managed to find a lot of true PO seed. I ordered seeds from Kelly Winterton and got 25 different accessions from the nordic genebank. I found 14 varieties in total but i have very few bulbs of each variety. One red type of which i only had 2 bulbs is probably lost because the bulbs were soft and half-rotten. For next year i will have to multiply all these varieties and grow out the seeds. A fun project, but a lot of work, too.

 Perennial kale   A few years ago i was offered some perennial kale seeds from a daubenton x tree collards cross made by Graham Jenkins-Belohorska who chanced upon those two varieties flowering at the same time in his garden. Normally perennial kale does not flower and just produces leaves for several years. At some point the plant will then fall over and continue to grow or make roots again where it touches the ground. I have seen a perennial kale plant in ireland that was 15 years old. I sowed the seeds and planted out the small kale plants. I then just let them grow and except some occasional weeding and looking after in the first few months the plants were then left to grow without care for 3 years. The second year i also removed all the plants that flowered. I am now left with 3 different perennial kale varieties that grew from the daubenton x tree collards cross. I can't really find a strong difference in flavour but i remember that one plant had leaves that tasted ...

 Avocado   Here is another picture of my outdoor avocado today on the 20th of december. It has already been exposed to some frost recently when we had a cold spell. The tops of the upper leaves are damaged slightly but i can notice it is holding up better than before. It has a wound at the bottom of the trunk that i covered in clay paste again and hold it in place with a bandage. It is a mexicola avocado. When you crush a leaf you get a typical anis smell which is an indicator of it being a mexican avocado and of cold-hardiness. Mexicola avocadoes produce small black avocado fruit of excellent taste with edible skin.     Next to it i planted another avocado seedling that is now heavily protected for its first winter outside. I can't remember the name of the variety. There is another seed-grown avocado in a pot in my polytunnel waiting to be planted out next year. The name of the variety this seed came from is "Fantastic" another mexican-type avocado with al...

 Sorbopyrus This is a picture of a seedless shipova fruit that was sent to me by Philipp Weiss. Check out his blog and this interesting article he wrote about sorbopyrus: https://xn--skogstrdgrden-hfbr.xn--stjrnsund-x2a.nu/shipova-och-andra-paronhybrider/?lang=en

 Growing Avocadoes outdoors. I started to try and grow avocadoes outdoors a few years ago. I only managed to have some moderate success when i started to grow a mexican type avocado variety called "mexicola". Mexicola is a variety that is said to have a good cold tolerance up to -7 degree Celsius without damage. I have one small tree growing outside at my place that has survived 2 winters already and is now still looking quite good. Last winter it pulled through unprotected. The leaves do when spring finally comes look very spent and wasted though, but for now it always grew back. There is a big difference between a plant being able to grow and survive and it eventually being able to set and ripen fruit. So i don't know if i will ever get avocadoes but the plant is surviving and growing so far. All my earlier attempts before i used mexicola had failed. This is a picture of my mexicola avocado on the 1st of september this year.

 Potato Onions I started growing potato onions years ago when i got a PO variety from Ireland. They grow well and this is the best type of onion for your own onion needs if you don't want to bother with seeds or onion sets. This is a picture of the "irish" potato onion variety When i first grew them i thought this was an ancient, almost extinct vegetable and i recently tried to find more varieties. I ordered some on the internet and found 4 different varieties that came from germany. When they arrived i saw that they all pretty much looked the same. Brownish/yellow like my irish variety, so i realized that there are many different PO varieties still circulating and that they can easily be mistaken to be the same. The 4 varieties i received from germany.

 Sorbopyrus I have grafted sorbopyrus "shipova" and sobopyrus "tatarka", two varieties of sorbopyrus, which is a hybrid tree of pyrus communis x sorbus aria, onto quince C dwarf rootstock. The idea is to then cross the two and to try and grow new sorbopyrus varieties. Both grafts took and are looking ok. Sorbopyrus is known to take a long time before starting to flower so by grafting it on to Quince C and by constricting the roots i am hoping to speed up flowering. This type of fruit tree is often called Shipova but Shipova is in reality just one variety of sorbopyrus. It is a nice name though and i can see why people refer to the tree by this name. Shipova also is considered the best variety and the most widely grown. But this is because most people don't know tatarka, which was grown by a mister Tatar at the botanical gardens in Prague from sorbopyrus seed. Sorbopyrus, and shipova in particular, apparently rarely produce viable seed and many fruits are seedles...

  Dwarf Beech The Dwarf Beech (fagus sylvatica var. tortuosa) is an amazing tree that occurs naturally in sweden, denmark, germany and france. They grow in a very contorted, twisted fashion which gives them a mystical, almost magical allure. Some types grow in a creeping way horizontally along the ground while others reach 4 to 5 meters in height with a typical umbrella shape and the tips of their branches touching the ground. They can grow roots where their branches touch the earth and are also able to make root suckers sometimes. Touching branches can fuse and grow together and their way of growing turns them into individually very different and unique plants. There is also trees that grow taller with an exposed trunk and a twisted crown.  Nobody really knows why they grow like this since it doesn't seem to offer any advantage in terms of competition. Also their existence in at least 4 different countries apparently independant of each other is mysterious. Genetic analysis h...

  Hazelnut Breeding Project I started breeding hazelnuts in 2018. I have a friend who has a hazelnut orchard of about 50 hazelnut trees of 5 or 6 different varieties. He let me collect hazelnuts for sowing. I stratified the seeds and grew them in my polytunnel before planting them out in a temporary nursery. I stratified 550 hazelnuts. By the time i planted them out in their final position the next winter 2019/2020 i had 234 plants in total. This was partly due to the fact some never germinated and that when i came back from having left for a week 50 or so plants in my tunnel had been attacked, chewed and dug up from the crates by rodents, something i didn't anticipate. I planted a wooden stick next to each plant to mark their position. I planted them fairly close at about 2 meters distance in a random fashion. The hazelnuts, by the time i planted them, were between 3 inches and 3 feet tall. In retrospective it was a mistake to plant out the small ones, because they had a hard time...

 The 6 to 1 method of seed stratification. I got the idea to do this after i talked with a friend about stratification. She told me that the ideal moisture content of sand for stratifying seeds is 15 to 20 percent. I then figured if i divide 100 by 6 i end up with 16.6, so i took 6 flat spoons or units of sand to one unit of water giving me sand with 16.6 percent moisture. I take the sand and heat it up in a stove at a high temperature firstly to sterilize and more importantly to get bone dry sand. For very small seeds i sieve the sand. Then i put six parts of dry sand and one part of water in a (ideally sterilized) jam jar, put the seeds in, close the lid and place it in a plastic bag that i tie shut with a knot. The jar then is placed in the fridge. This has worked very well for me for all kinds of fruit tree seeds and vegetable seeds. While some desert plant seeds might be too wet like that and some mangrove or swamp/water plant seeds might be too dry (but this is speculation-i ...