PERMABREED

 Last year many monkey puzzle trees (araucaria araucana) around here made good nuts and for the first time i tried them. Raw they are ok, but not great like a raw sweet chestnut. Lightly roasted they are delicious. Roasted too much they turn hard and are less good. So i went and collected nuts under all the trees i could find and kept the biggest for sowing. I was surprised that they grow very easily if you don't let them dry out they germinate and grow quite well in poor soil. The seeds germinated very well and now i have quite a lot of young baby trees. One thing i love about them is that they don't need fencing. I heard that goats will eat them but my local wild life doesn't touch them. I will probably plant them all out amongst my larger ones. Lots of tasty nuts sometime in the future.

 I am growing out feijoa seedlings in hope of finding plants better adapted to my climate. Inspired by an internet site about growing feijoas in the UK i thought i would try mass seeding and subsequent selection. Feijoa seeds, difficult to separate and clean from the flesh, germinate quite easily with sufficient heat (minimum 20 celsius, i'd say) They are rather slow growing and need good care. My hope is to plant all seedlings outdoors and to screen for the most vigourous and quick flowering. I have several varieties of feijoa growing in my polytunnel that i planted last year and i am looking forward to taste really ripe feijoa for the first time (meaning grown under heat) i tasted friends outdoor feijoa and it was good, but you could tell it could be much better.