A Seed Saver's Garden

[Decoy1]

I feel like so many people have some knowledge or experience of horseradish. I have none. I'd never seen it until I bought a small plant this spring and I don't think I've ever eaten any. From what people shared about it last time I mentioned horseradish, it seems like an almost weedy plant. I can't tell that yet since I only planted mine in June, but I did choose a spot hemmed in by bricks so it can't spread. I'm excited to harvest roots this spring!

Anyway, the whole point of what I'm getting at here is a neat little video by Bob Flowerdew recently. He was saying he always wondered why people allowed so much horseradish to grow on the farm he grew up in England, until someone finally told him it was the fiber. He did a demonstration where he had soaked a stem with a leaf on the end in a bucket for a month. When he pulled it out of the bucket much of the plant matter had decomposed, leaving behind this wonderful handful of strings. He showed a thoroughly cleaned stem and my goodness it was a lovely little abundant bundle of blonde fibers suitable for using to tie things up!

I found a link afterward while researching this, so neat!

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Horseradish fibres for cordage – Woodland Ways Blog – Bushcraft and Survival

blog.woodland-ways.co.uk

Interesting.

Horseradish makes a large, strong vigorous plant eventually, and it is indeed invasive. Where I used to live a field of allotments on which locals grew vegetables was turned into a sports field. It was regularly mown. But if the grass was left two or three weeks, large horseradish leaves continued to grow up in the middle of the field years after the allotments had ceased to exist. So my impression is that you can never get rid of it ever you have it - but of course you might never want to get rid of it! I don't think I'd risk planting it in my veg garden though. Over five years you might end up with several square metres of it

 

[Decoy1]

The carrot experiment has officially reached completion. It has been quite interesting really, more so than I expected it to be. Getting a nice big harvest of indistinguishable carrots would have been fine; I wasn't convinced there was going to be that much difference between carrots.

I am definitely going to be ordering more Kyoto Red, Kuroda, and Chantenay Red. Every single one of those carrots really stood - true carrot excellence. Black Nebula was stunning to look at, but the taste just wasn't there. Not sure if I'll grow that one again. Manpukuji was fun because it can get so big, but nothing else was remarkable about it and the digging so cautiously not to break the tips was a bit of an annoyance. All the rest sort of blended together without a lot of distinction. Tendersweet seemed too small and skinny (like mini Imperators), Baby Finger same. Autumn King was even below average. The Italian carrot varieties were nice. Nantes definitely gets honorable mention and as a foundational carrot it makes the cut. I still liked Kuroda better, but Nantes is not far behind because it gains size very early too, and has A+ flavor.

Dug the last of the 'Chantenay Red' yesterday before it snowed. I really do love this carrot, such a good variety with so many pluses. Big, easy to dig up, heat tolerant, excellent flavor, doesn't need deep soil. It shall now stay forevermore.

Your Chantenay Red look great. Beautifully healthy. It's a good standard in UK too alongside, in my case, Early Nantes, Amsterdam Forcing and Autumn King. I love growing purple carrots too but find Black Nebula unsatisfactory, because they seem rather thin in shape more than on grounds of taste. Autumn King for me is a good large reliable carrot for winter storage. Like you I grew Manpukuji this year but had very poor germination and, again like you, found they were almost impossible to lift without breaking the roots. This undermined the whole point of growing them!. To take advantage of their length I guess you'd have to resort to growing them in a sandy mixture in a drainpipe as competitors in vegetable shows have traditionally done in the northern counties of England.

 

[flowerbug]

@Decoy1 growing carrots in drainpipes, that's a new one on me...

 

[heirloomgal]

Inspiring photos, HeirloomGal .

I hope DW has the same response. Our growing looong carrots is problematic. Those are her preference but, even in some of our better soil, there are so many rocks that crooked carrots are way too common. In the new beds, a carrot intending to grow more than 8 inches is likely to hit very bad conditions. Interesting that parsnips tend to power through and then become nearly impossible to harvest without breaking.

I have grown Chatenays before but not the Red. Kuroda was just identified by that name but now I see the adjectives "Improved" "New" "Long" "Shin" ..? Nantes has been productive, flavorful and a personal favorite.

Steve

It comes as somewhat of a surprise to me that long carrots would be a preference. Mind you, I don't have a lot of experience with Imperator types, or Imperator itself. One of my first dog eared garden books was by Lois Hole, and it was through her that I learned that Imperator was bred for commercial qualities, like storage and durability during mechanical handling. Perhaps though there are better long carrots than those, it seems like the longer thinner carrots are less common than the Nantes type.

I would be interested to try Shin Kuroda, since I enjoy Kuroda so much.

 

[heirloomgal]

Your Chantenay Red look great. Beautifully healthy. It's a good standard in UK too alongside, in my case, Early Nantes, Amsterdam Forcing and Autumn King. I love growing purple carrots too but find Black Nebula unsatisfactory, because they seem rather thin in shape more than on grounds of taste. Autumn King for me is a good large reliable carrot for winter storage. Like you I grew Manpukuji this year but had very poor germination and, again like you, found they were almost impossible to lift without breaking the roots. This undermined the whole point of growing them!. To take advantage of their length I guess you'd have to resort to growing them in a sandy mixture in a drainpipe as competitors in vegetable shows have traditionally done in the northern counties of England.

Interesting to know that you grow Autumn King and Amsterdam with good results, maybe I shouldn't write them off yet. They were both fairly small for me, with skinny bottoms and much bigger tops. They were Thompson & Morgan seed packets I think, not typical carrots grown in my area. Maybe there was some factor in the season that caused them to underperform for me, and a different year would bring different results.

I accidentally discovered a trick with Manpukuji partway in the growing season; the first one got a hefty digging session which resulted in what looked like a deep gopher hole at the end of the carrot row. I was gently picking them scattered after that, sort of thinning the bed as I harvested. Of course, some broke. But then I realized that the carrot next to the original hole could be pushed in that sideways direction and would fall out easily in that empty space. If I hadn't randomly harvested in the bed, I could have gone down the row like dominoes pushing each carrot over into the neighbouring hole and collecting them easily. As it was, once i hit the first big gap in the carrot row I lost that effect and would have had to dig a new large hole, difficult to do in the middle of a tight carrot row. So, I think if you harvest Manpukuji in single file, starting at one end and working your way up the row one after the other, with the hole following, they could probably come out pretty easily. Just from a practical point of view I'd think this must be how the breeders were harvesting these, especially at the bigger lengths because I have no idea how else you could easily get out all those 3 or 4 foot carrots! Or maybe they used pipes too!

 

[heirloomgal]

Been thinking about seed vaults lately.

I really do wonder what the percentages are in public opinion for and against Svalbard? I feel like in the beginning there was mixed feelings, some was definitely positive. But now that almost 20 years has passed I wonder what the tally is. I feel like people are far more aware and concerned about institutional capture.

There is about 6 big ones worldwide, one in Fort Collins that I didn't know about until recently. The Plant Gene Resources of Canada facility has 110,000 accessions. The UK has a big one, 40,000 species. The Vavilov Institute collection in Russia is large. It's somewhat of a curiosity to me the actual purpose of the vaults.

I found out this weekend that the Svalbard vault was not built into an old mine shaft as I previously thought, but the Nordic Gene Bank did have a seed vault in an abandoned coal mine in the area in 1984. That gene bank, it turns out, is what inspired the idea to cut into the rock of a permafrost mountain there to create the Svalbard vault, 130 meters deep. Even more interesting, it turns out Svalbard (the archipelago) is positioned on a fault line. We have a fault line here in the science center, (Creighton Fault) we've walked through it many times underground. Svalbard being on the western margin of the Barents shelf, has significant tectonic activity. There is plenty of seismic activity too, so Svalbard experiences about a hundred earthquakes a year.

Somewhat surprising that they chose such a location for what will likely become the world's largest seed collection.

 

[heirloomgal]

This fall I've felt a little more burn out than the usual post seed processing & harvest, post fall garden clean up slump. Realistically, it was a super busy summer and every single day had a calculated purpose or plan, there was not a single down day. DD's bubbling enthusiasm for free diving and paddleboarding had me on water for a lot of the summer too, most evenings. Plus we took down a lot of trees again this year, then the dog getting sick and needing major surgery + 24/7 care for a few weeks in late spring seemed to add compression. Sleeping on a yoga mat with him on the living room floor for a month started the gardening season off with some fatigue too. (At least these are my excuses, lol).

But tonight I took an inventory of the years collected seeds (and in some cases tubers). Not the years plants, because there's a lot I don't save seed for. After I looked at the list I felt a little less guilty that my energy has not been as endless as I'd like it to be this month. It was a lot of seeds, more than I think I've done in awhile. Maybe ever. But, I can happily tuck it away for now and enjoy the bounty, and down time. The snow is here and the ponds are freezing over.

140 bean types, 35 kinds of peas, 15 sweet peppers (both bells & conical types), 81 tomato varieties, 6 sunchoke varieties, 4 flower seed types (and some 4 o'clock tubers) 1 herb, 1 lettuce, 4 annual fruits, 1 Fava type, 1 Corn variety, 1 miscellaneous fun crop (Devil's Claw).

The carrot harvest isn't on that list because I plan to eat them, put as far as workload added to the pile, they were alot. The ground was very wet from rain when I pulled the last of them and they needed scrubbing to clean and sort. I spent over an hour yesterday washing sticky soil and clay bits from them. A very worthwhile crop, but that was a fair bit of work to process!

 

[Decoy1]

This fall I've felt a little more burn out than the usual post seed processing & harvest, post fall garden clean up slump. Realistically, it was a super busy summer and every single day had a calculated purpose or plan, there was not a single down day. DD's bubbling enthusiasm for free diving and paddleboarding had me on water for a lot of the summer too, most evenings. Plus we took down a lot of trees again this year, then the dog getting sick and needing major surgery + 24/7 care for a few weeks in late spring seemed to add compression. Sleeping on a yoga mat with him on the living room floor for a month started the gardening season off with some fatigue too. (At least these are my excuses, lol).

But tonight I took an inventory of the years collected seeds (and in some cases tubers). Not the years plants, because there's a lot I don't save seed for. After I looked at the list I felt a little less guilty that my energy has not been as endless as I'd like it to be this month. It was a lot of seeds, more than I think I've done in awhile. Maybe ever. But, I can happily tuck it away for now and enjoy the bounty, and down time. The snow is here and the ponds are freezing over.

140 bean types, 35 kinds of peas, 15 sweet peppers (both bells & conical types), 81 tomato varieties, 6 sunchoke varieties, 4 flower seed types (and some 4 o'clock tubers) 1 herb, 1 lettuce, 4 annual fruits, 1 Fava type, 1 Corn variety, 1 miscellaneous fun crop (Devil's Claw).

The carrot harvest isn't on that list because I plan to eat them, put as far as workload added to the pile, they were alot. The ground was very wet from rain when I pulled the last of them and they needed scrubbing to clean and sort. I spent over an hour yesterday washing sticky soil and clay bits from them. A very worthwhile crop, but that was a fair bit of work to process!

That’s a huge amount of varieties in your seed crop, not to mention a host of other life pressures.

I feel at full stretch doing roughly half of the numbers you do. The only things I do more of would be that I that I do 20+ lettuce varieties, (guessing because I haven’t counted yet), more ornamentals and quite a lot of chillis from bagged flowers. But your seed crop is impressive, especially the numbers of beans and tomatoes, and I’m not surprised you feel exhausted. I also admire that you can produce so much in what is apparently not infinite growing space.