PERMABREED

 Asimina triloba. The paw paw tree from north america is one of the few fruit trees that can be grown in temperate climates and make exotic or tropical tasting fruit. I started growing this tree 2 years ago when i got a bunch of seedlings and seeds from a french guy in a plant exchange. I planted 15 seedlings in my fruit orchard and still have some seedlings in my tunnel. Last year they didn't grow that well for me. I ended up making shading structures with metal hoops and vlies to prevent sunburn. I don't know if this tree is able to grow here. It might be too cool in summer or not cold enough in winter or the soil might not be right. I will see this year how many (if any) of the 15 trees i planted will grow back. metal hoops and white p17 frost vlies to give the young seedlings shade. young seedlings in pots in my tunnel. Asimina triloba doesn't like being transplanted or having its roots disturbed so i used deep, tall pots.

 Vegetable garden. I built a fence around my vegetable garden because we have so many deer here and we don't have a dog. Last year all beans and cabbage plants were eaten by deer. I used a mixture of chestnut poles and metal posts to hold the fence up. The fence is a 1.5 (5foot) meter high sheep fence. Deer can probably jump over this if they really want to but i hope it will discourage them. Someone told me you can also put down the compost from your dry toilet and this will repel dear because they don't like the smell of humans (haven't tried this yet) I am going to use the Ruth Stout method of gardening adding hay mulch to my beds every year. To kickstart things off i had a friend of mine rotovate the soil with his tractor, then i put down a thick layer of farm yard manure and lots of hay on top.

 "Christophs Apfel" in flower. The first time that i have a flowering true service tree and this small tree was only grafted last year march/april and already flowered the same year. My sick tree (sossenheimer riese),which is grafted, was planted by myself 7 years ago and no signs of flowering. So this variety flowers quickly and makes rather small trees. If, grown from seed, they could retain this precocious flowering and small tree size it would be a fantastic dwarf rootstock. Another good usage is to graft scions from seed grown trees into these dwarf trees to get to discover the fruit quicker. If a seed grown plant is grafted into such a tree in its second year and then flowers in its third or fourth year it would seriously speed up the breeding possibilities as opposed to waiting 10 to 12 years for flowering when grown from seed. Young, grafted Christophs Apfel sorbus domestica tree starting its second year of growth. It flowered last year already immediately after being...

Disease. My tree is sick. It's depressing. My grafted sorbus domestica "Sossenheimer Riese" has an illness that seems to be spreading quicker than it is able to grow. I am really sad about this because it was my biggest true service tree. The extremities of the branches die out and the bark peels off. The buds dry and turn brown. It's really ugly. Practically all branches of my tree are attained now. There is now more dead brown buds than green ones. The tree seems to be dying quicker than it can grow; Following the advice of a friend of mine who knows a lot about trees i cut off the top of the crown that was really badly disease ridden and i heavily mulched the tree with wood chips. Also i had originally planted a lot of comfrey around it. If the tree doesn't show signs of improvement i am afraid that i will have to cut it because i already watched another one slowly get sick, dry out and die. This tree is growing in a field as part of 5 grafted sorbus domestica ...

 Ransoms (allium ursinum) Wild garlic or ransoms is a great plant that i would encourage anyone who has a bit of land to grow on their property. Once established all you have to do is to come by in march/april and harvest the leaves that are tasty and healthy. Youy can eat them raw in salads, cook nice meals with and make delicious pesto. You chop the leaves really fine add some salt and roasted sesame, sunflower seeds, hazelnuts or pine nuts and olive oil to cover. Press the mixture down in the sterilised jar to get all the air bubbles out and make sure to have it sitting in and "under" the oil so nothing will rot. Then 3 weeks later and for up to a year or more you just cook pasta and eat it with the pesto. Delicious and healthy! Breton ramsons. I already ate a lot of the leaves. German ramsons from my home area in northern germany growing much earlier and already in flower

 Potato onions. As usual never really having the time to do anything properly and beings so busy doing stuff my seed grown potato onions are now sitting in 7 crates waiting to be planted out. Considering that i probably had over 2000 seeds of 28 different provenances the outcome so far is really bad. But sometimes i take comfort in telling myself that the useless gardener by extreme neglect provides a sort of selection for the toughest material. These crates are made of polystyrene a very toxic material that i despise, but i can pick them up for free in a supermarket because the fish is transported in them and they will throw them away and they will be burnt in the incinerator anyway so i figure that i am giving them a second life before i will take them to the dump and then they will be sent to get burnt. Hopefully one day we as a human species won't use these horrible toxic materials anymore.  Potato onions. I have about 10 different varieties that i got this year in very sm...

 Vegetable garden. I finally managed to build a fence around my vegetable garden to keep the deer out. After having had my veggies destroyed several times by deer, us living in the middle of nowhere surrounded by forests and not having a dog, i knew i had to do this. Now the fence is 1.5 meters (5foot) tall and apparently deer can easily jump this i am still hoping that it will discourage them. I had a friend rotovate the soil with a tractor and out lots of farm manure on the beds. Then i covered it with a thick layer of hay thinking of starting a Ruth Stout vegetable patch. The Ruth Stout method essentially consists of piling a thick layer of hay onto your beds each year and as time goes on you can work the beds with your hands only. The edges will surely need weeding, I think.

 Apple trees. My two giant apples are sprouting leaves. The varieties are Aport (Alexander) and Peasgood Nonsuch. Giant because they make really big apples. I grafted Peasgood Nonsuch into the Aport tree. My idea as a fun project is to cross these two giant varieties to grow new really large-fruited varieties from seed. the two apple trees grafted on dwarfing rootstock, growing together in a container. Notice the peasgood nonsuch branch grafted onto the Aport apple leafing out at the same time. This is despite the fact that the scion came from a different tree because i have a second peasgood nonsuch. Unfortunately this peasgood nonsuch is noit flowering and the aport apple only grew one flower bud. My second peasgood nonsuch is flowering but i don't know if i will manage to cross the two. There is always something that doesn't work out... I have another apple tree that's supposed to be one of the tastiest irish apple varieties called Irish Peach. This is a summer apple tha...

 Jubaea chilensis. A palm tree from Chile that makes miniature coconuts. A very beautiful tree that can get huge.I have two seedlings.It's supposed to be quite cold hardy but the trouble is that it grows very slow. From seed to fruit production can take anywhere between 50 and 80 years. Now that's a new record. I don't know any other tree where you have to wait that long. So best case scenario i will be 92 years old when the tree starts to flower! Truly a tree that you plant for the next generation, unless i manage to unlock the secret to immortality.....

 sorbus domestica. "Christophs Apfel" is starting to open its flowers. If the characteristic of growing into small trees and flowering quickly is passed on through the seed this would make a good dwarfing rootstock and would be very helpful to discover the fruit of seedlings by grafting branches onto it. flower buds starting to open despite its small size flowers on two branches

 sorbopyrus - my two sorbopyrus plants are sprouting now so they survived the winter. With each passing year the prospect of them flowering draws a step closer. I planted them in a metal barrel that i cut in half in order to constrict the roots. I grafted them on to quince C rootstock to speed up flowering. The hope is to be able to cross the two and get viable seed to grow new varieties. The smaller one is a shipova and the taller one is a tatarka. Sorbopyrus plants are notorious for taking forever to start flowering so i hope that these will end up doing it quicker.

Adzuki Bean (vigna angularis) A few years ago i bought adzuki bean seeds from a rare plant nursery. They were said in the description to come from the himalayas and to be more cold-hardy and able to grow in europe. I tried growing them twice and never managed to germinate them. Then i found the pack of seeds again while i was looking through my seed box and i thought before throwing them away i'll try and plant them. I had put watermelon seeds to germinate in some wet toilet paper on a plate and i thought i just throw them in there. I had placed a second plate on top of the first to avoid drying out and after 10 days when i remembered them several adzuki beans had sprouted. So this is a new crop for me to try and grow. Adzuki beans are very nutritious and have a high protein content. I have to try and look after them well because i have so few plants and i need to renew my seed stock. Adzuki beans growing.

 Tomatoes. these are grown from seed that originally came from Joseph Lofthouse before someone sent them to me. They are part of his promiscuously pollinating tomato breeding project. Unfortunately i had bad germination with only Q12 growing and one each of S37 and S20. The ones that are on the left and the right are other ones that i stuck in later. I listened to a podcast where Joseph said that he crossed russian solanum lycopersicum varieties whose flowers attracted bumblebees with many different wild tomato species. His goal is an outbreeding, diverse tomato landrace if I understand correctly. Some of the plants he grew tasted of seafood and some grew sprawling along the soil like pumpkins while others stood erect like raspberry bushes and didn't require staking. Far out stuff. I am looking forward to tasting them and to see already how much diversity there is in Q12.

 Avocado. My mexicola avocado is looking so bad now that i am starting to doubt whether it will grow back. It could always in theory sprout back up from the roots though and that's what i am kind of hoping for. If that happens i will probably cut everything off except the new shoot. I have a second smaller plant outside that looks in much better shape. It is a fantastic seedling so that might be why. To me, which might make some people laugh, it looks really good right now compared to the mexicola. fantastic seedling that up to now survived the winter quite well. Notice the green petioles of the brown leaves. This tree if no further catastrophe happens will surely grow again. And now here comes the mexicola: this is not looking good... It will be interesting to see if it grows back from anywhere above ground, from the roots or not at all.

 Blight resistant tomatoes. I grew the Crimson Crush F1 tomato in 2019. This is a relatively new variety that was advertised as the first blight resistant tomato. I was amazed by its vigour and performance. The tomatoes didn't really taste that great but i never managed to grow tomatoes outdoors here with any real degree of success so just the fact of harvesting red, ripe(ish) tomatoes was amazing. The following year i found quite a lot of plants that had self-seeded. I had kept seeds of the crimson crush fruit with the idea of dehybridising it as i read about in Carol Deppe's book who writes about Alan Kapuler doing this. But i didn't even need to sow the seeds because i found so many small plants that had self-seeded. Also it's quite possible that i would have just forgotten about it because of lack of time and so many other things on my to-do-list. I then planted quite a lot of these plants and through my usual neglect 15 or so survived and at the end there was 3 pla...

 Sorbomespilus dessertnaja. An amazing tree bred by the great Ivan Mitchurin who crossed the rowan (sorbus aucuparia) with the black chokeberry (aronia melanocarpa). He then went on to cross one of these hybrids, Likjornaja i think, with the medlar (mespilus germanica) The result was a small shrub rarely exceeding 2.5 meters in height (8 feet), very cold hardy with fruit that is supposed to be very tasty. It took me several years of searching to get this tree and i am still waiting to try the fruit one day. It is now flowering for the third time but has never managed to make fruit yet. I hope this year it will happen. Since a friend of mine has the same problem we are wondering whether it might be a pollination issue. However the last two years we had really bad caterpillar infestations and many sorbus trees don't grow well for me here. Close by are growing Aronia, Rowan and Medlar so pollination should not be a problem. Hopefully there will be fruit this year. This is also a great...

 Sorbus domestica. I sowed seeds of large-fruited sorbus domestica types that i stratified for 100 days in the fridge. The seeds came from a friend who has many different varieties. My Christophs Apfel tree is continuing to grow its flowers. I can't wait! And i took a picture of my biggest seed-grown tree that is now nearly 12 foot tall and comes from a large tree growing here in brittany. The great thing about this breton tree seems to be that it is well adapted to growing here since all 5 seedlings that i grew from its seeds show no signs of disease. sorbus domestica   seedlings tallest of my 5 seed-grown breton trees.

 7 varieties of brussels sprouts growing. The box broke when i tried to lift it down on the floor so now i will have to plant some of them tomorrow. I will try and plant 4 of each variety with the goal being of trying all the varieties and letting one of each run to seed in order to start a Lofthouse-type landrace with them. The goal is to breed a strain that will gradually ripen over a long period of time, giving small amounts of sprouts per plant over many months. So i will try and identify which of these 7 varieties are closest to what i am trying to breed and let them all cross. Also comparing the taste will be interesting. 7 different brussels sprouts varieties