PERMABREED

 Christophs Apfel. My small tree is starting to make tiny fruit. Luckily sorbus domestica is self-fertile and when it pollinates itself there usually is only one seed in each fruit. Seen as this variety fruits at a really young age i want to sow the seeds and see if the offspring will inherite this trait. It will be interesting to see the size and appearance of the fruit. Hopefully the tree won't get sick and will manage to make some fruit and therefore seed. If the early flowering trait is passed on to the next generation these seedlings will make excellent sorbus domestica dwarf rootsock.

Watermelon.  Trying to grow watermelons in a landrace type of way i this year germinated seeds of 4 different varieties. The seeds were really expensive. The varieties are Golden Midget, Cream of Saskatchewan, Sweet Siberian and Blacktail Mountain. Golden Midget showed really poor germination and all but one plant died on me, so the one remaining plant is really dear to me. The lone survivor of the golden midget seed. It has been really cold here and the young seedlings are struggling to grow. I am growing them in a polytunnel. I have grown watermelons before and the troble is to get the seeds to ripen and be viable. The darker they are the better. Hopefully i will manage this year to harvest watermelons with ripe seeds inside.

 Melons. I started growing melons a few years ago. Since about 4 years now i have switched to growing Joseph Lofthouse's muskmelon landrace. I am trying to adapt it to my conditions here in brittany. I am a big fan of Joseph's landrace way of growing vegetables and it makes a lot of sense to me. This being said the melons haven't been growing very well for me yet but this is because he lives in a very different climate than me and he grows way higher numbers of plants than i do. He talks about the magic of his landrace gardening technique usually kicking in in the third year and since i grow a lot less plants than he does it will probably take a lot longer. First batch of melons growing I had a really good plant 3 years ago that gave me 6 ripe nice juicy melons, much better than all the other plants. I kept all the seed. Maybe it was a good year. 2 years ago i had a fruit that was so tasty and sugary, eventhough it was not ripe, it really stood out from all the others. But ...

 Potato onions. It is done! Finally i got around to planting my seed grown potato onions. I counted at least 600. In reality there is more but i already now that quite a few will die or be useless so i prefer to round down the numbers straight away. I am hoping to get 10 to 20 new varieties out of this. Only one third to one quarter will make decent onions and only one third to one quarter of those will store properly over winter and be of decent size. I have grown them from seed before. 600 seedlings from 28 different provenances. Large salad onion planted next to potato onions. The two flower heads on the left are the green mountain potato onion. The irish potato onions that i planted around the salad onion aren't flowering. Notice the difference in size of the stalks and flowers. This is the kind of vigour and size that i would like to breed into the potato onion. If i manage to cross the two i might improve potato onion size.

 Sorbopyrus. Glad to see that both of my sorbopyrus are leafing out nicely now so they are heading into their second year of life. Since i have only one of each grafted onto quince c, i need them to stay alive and grow if i ever want to attempt to cross them. I have others grafted onto kirchensaller but they are notorious for taking forever to flower so it could be in 20 years time and while i have some patience this is really too long to wait. The two varieties are shipova and tatarka. Shipova is very well known but tatarka is more of an underdog, reputed to be excellent. It was bred by a mister tatar from the botanical garden in prag who managed to germinate bollwiller pear seeds.