Our on-going 'super-early-tasty-tomato' breeding project is now in its 5th year with some excellent vine tomatoes being multiplied up for us by Tony Haigh. It appears that our particular selection is now stable for 'vine' type and we just need to settle on the final flavour we prefer.

We'll lay them all out on the table and let our friends decide in a grand tomato-tasting session. Those will be the ones we sow from next year.

In the past, every gardener was a plant breeder. So we also made seed from these breeding lines available on our website last year and an astounding 368 of you are also joining in - having requested seed of either the Vine or Bush breeding lines.

This is a great parallel-breeding project and by now we think you should all have big plants with lots of very early green tomatoes set on them. But every one will taste and grow a little differently from the others. . .

Remember, you need to taste & evaluate all the plants you grew and save seed from just 1 tomato from your one favourite plant. Do this for 3 or 4 more years and you will have your own super-early tomato.

Do let us know how you get on. (We may not be able to reply to all, but we promise we will read them & take note!)

Wonderful Books

Although we only sell a couple of books directly ourselves there are a few other books that we've found helpful, and thought worth a mention here.

Eliot Coleman's book 'The New Organic Grower' is aimed at the small market gardener, but is fascinating for anyone who is serious about growing vegetables on a larger scale, whether for their own use or for sale.

We've found his ideas about tools and tool use, green manuring, rotations and planning invaluable in developing our gardens.

On a completely different scale, 'Patio Produce' by Paul Peacock is intended for those who have no vegetable garden as such, and have to do all their growing in containers. Its a very practical book which should help beginners who want to know what they can plant, how big a container they need to use, and what the best ways are to get the best return from a very small space.

Moving on from gardening to seedsaving, Carol Deppe's book 'Breed your own Vegetable Varieties' goes one step on from the Sue Stickland seedsaving book (also highly recommended), and shows you how to start breeding your own varieties.

Although she does go into the genetics that underpin breeding, its very readable for non-scientists. In fact, the background information is really helpful for seedsaving in general, since as well as helping you to develop your own varieties, it is equally useful if you want to make sure that you are maintaining an existing variety true to type and with good vigour.

Finally, we have just realised that we should update our website. We've recommended Joy Larkcom's book Oriental Vegetables before, but at that time it was out of print, and only available second hand. Its good to see that it has now been reprinted.

If you fancy getting any of these from your library, then all the details (ISBN etc) are on our books page.

"Economic Growth" - the idea that we all will have more and more stuff faster and faster, for ever -
is simply not possible on a finite planet.

In fact, economic growth depends on consuming more and more fossil fuels at an ever increasing rate. Unfortunately, we actually have less and less fuel each year now as we started to run out in 2008. For a few years we substituted borrowed money to continue the illusion, but even that is no longer sustainable, as seen by the fact that every country is in debt and no-one can repay it all.

So, in the future, in a 'growthless' economy , we will all have quite a bit less 'stuff' each year, and spend a bit more time doing real work like growing vegetables. This is inevitable, and will indeed require real readjustments to society.

For example, before we had got in the way of consuming vast amounts of oil, in the 1920's, about 40% of the population worked in agriculture to feed the nation. Now it is 3%. We simply replaced the people with oil-powered machines.

So now the oil has peaked, over the next 30 years, the UK will need an additional 15 million farmers as we replace fuel-intensive industrial agriculture with more efficient human power. Where will they live? How will they learn? Is our Government facing up to the scale of the challenge?

One thing is for sure though:
For the past 11,000 years (yes, eleven thousand years),
generations and generations of ordinary people grew most of their vegetables at home in their gardens,
and saved their own seed to pass down through generations.

In the past 50 years we have forgotten all that in a whirl of mad consumption in supermarkets, but what we think is 'normal' is a tiny blink in human history.

Now is the time to learn again. Do teach your kids to grow their own veg, and check out the free seed-saving information on our website.

On the left-hand bar of every page of our website are a series of links to freely-copyable seedsaving instructions,
so check them out!

note: for a much deeper discussion of the economic issues raised here, try this link

Useful tools

As you can imagine, we have quite a lot of weeding to do, so our various hoes and other cultivation tools get a lot of use. We thought that other gardeners might be interested in a few of our favourites.

Wheelhoes

For general hoeing between rows, our wheelhoe gets a lot of use. A wheelhoe is exactly what it sounds like - a hoe, mounted on a frame with a wheel. You roll it along, and as the wheel takes the weight, the only effort is a push-pull motion to cut the weeds.

They're fantastic if you have a big plot - say allotment size or larger. You do have to plant all your crops in very straight rows, but then you simply push the wheelhoe up and down those rows, and you can keep a large area cultivated in a fraction of the time that it would take with a normal hoe.

Wheelhoes were popular in the early part of the last century for medium to larger scale vegetable gardening, and you may be able to find second hand examples that can be brought back to working order. 

They come in various styles – one or two wheels, which may be small (pushchair size wheels) or large (bicycle size).  You could potentially also make your own  if you have the skills and time.

They can also be bought new, and come with various attachments including stirrup hoes, goosefoot hoes, ridging attachments, seeders, and others.  Ours is a 'Pico', made by Glaser tools in Switzerland (they're sold in the UK by Blackberry Lane Tools).

We have a few attachments for the wheelhoe, Kate prefers a goosefoot hoe (pictured right), but Ben likes to use an oscillating stirrup hoe. We also have a 3 tine cultivator, which is a hooked affair very useful for breaking up the soil & pulling out firmly rooted grass. And also hiller/furrower which we use to make furrows for planting, amongst other things, our various unusual tubers.

Although wheelhoes are mainly used for cultivating long rows, you can also get them with an offset attachment to the handle so that permanent beds can be hoed from the path.  We've tried this ourselves, and it does work, but we found that it was quite a bit more work than pushing the hoe in a straight line through regular row crops.

Hand hoes

On a smaller scale, we have a good selection of hand hoes. Our Collinear hoe (designed by Eliot Coleman, and also available from Blackberry Lane) is great for hoeing between plants if we get there in good time and the weeds are still small.

It is a very lightweight sharp hoe, that you use in a 'sweeping' motion, almost as if you were using a broom.

Most people seem, when handed a hoe, to naturally grip it with both thumbs pointing downwards - which leads to a bent over working stance and a ‘chopping’ motion. 

In contrast, the collinear hoe is designed to be held in a 'thumbs up' position, with a straight back - as demonstrated by Catherine on the right.

This is much faster, less hard on the back, and more precise. But it only works while the weeds are small. 5 minutes with the collinear hoe will save you hours of hand weeding later.

Actually, once you get used to this position, you may find, as I did, that you naturally move to using all hoes this way, and that your back benefits from the change. 

Small Hoes
When things get really bad, we have a few hand hoes that we really like.

We have found that Japanese weeding tools are excellent - lightweight and sharp. They are made with two layers of special steel forged together - the soft springy steel backs and reinforces a super-hard layer that holds a wicked edge.

Here it is weeding along a row of baby turnips. The edge at the top, next to the baby plants, is not sharp and so there is less risk of accidental disasters!

The crucial thing that we find with all of our hoes is to sharpen them regularly to keep a really good edge, so that they slice through the weeds, rather than dragging them out of the ground. 

Reducing Our Footprint - one step at a time. . .

The Real Seed Catalogue is not your usual 'limited company'. We have no shareholders, so we are not forced to do everything we can to maximise 'profit' at the expense of the environment. As part of our ethical policy, we keep trying to reduce our impact all the time. Part of that is to look at everything we do, and think, 'how can we do it better for the long-term health of the environment?'

One thing we worry about is the amount of plastic waste - which eventually, after the next ice age scrapes open all the landfill sites - will be floating in the sea. There's already a floating mat of tangled plastic the size of France in the middle of the Pacific, just from what gets dropped in the street and washes offshore in streams & rivers. So we would like not to be responsible for lots more.

We used to use padded bubble-envelopes for sending out the seeds - but while they are very light, they simply will not rot down.

So we switched to cardboard mailers for almost all our orders this year. It costs us about 20p more per order, which we have absorbed without increasing our postage costs, but we think it is worth it.

Your cardboard mailer can simply be composted or recyled once you have done with it. Or if you send it back to us with your order in it, we will re-use it.

We then discovered that we could further cut our packaging by 50% by the simple method of Felicia putting the cardboard mailing envelopes through the guillotine and cutting them all in half! Most orders still fit in the tiny envelopes, and there is 50% less manufacturing and transport pollution involved.

Finally, we found a source for paper-based packaging tape, with solvent-free adhesive. So you can happily burn, compost, or recycle the tape along with your cardboard mailing envelope.

We are still trying to solve the issue of the little plastic baggies the seeds themselves come in. The problem is that all the other options are not water-proof and the seeds slowly absorb moisture from the air. One of the reasons our germination rates are good is that we get the seeds really nice and dry before we pack them, so breathable packets would lose that benefit.

However, we have been experimenting for a while now with using paper packets for really large seeds such as peas and beans. The larger seeds don't absorb moisture very quickly at all, so they seem to be fine in paper packets. This should save about 10,000 plastic baggies a year from now on, and you'll see a gradual change-over this autumn as we pack new seed.

Of course, the best solution environmentally would be if you kept your own seeds at home, swapped them with your neighbours, and we didn't have to post them all over the place.

This is why we only offer real, non-hybrid seed, and why we supply seed-saving instructions with every packet, so you can save good, true-to-type seed at home. It is pretty easy and you really will get good seed if you follow the basic instructions. Why not give it a go this year?

In the Kitchen . . .

Our various unusual tubers are always amazingly popular (apologies to those who have found them sold out before they got there). For those of you who have been growing the yacon this year, and are wondering what different things you can do with your harvest of tubers, Felicia has been researching (and making and eating!) Yacon syrup, and also has a few other delicious suggestions. Here is her report:

Making your own sweetener - syrup from Yacon

Yacon syrup is made from the tubers of this tall annual plant. It tastes very sweet in a distinctive way, somewhere between treacle and honey but completely different. It’s probably the easiest sweetener to grow and produce yourself in a British climate, since this tuber is much easier to juice than sugar beet. You can download a comprehensive scientific review of its chemical composition from here.

Yacon syrup is made with an evaporator for commercial scale production, but you can make it at home with just a juicer, a pot and a heat source.  You will need approximately 30 kilos of yacon pulp to make one kilo of syrup. I estimate that the yacon plants we grew outdoors in Pembrokeshire produced somewhere between one and five kilograms of yacon each, but I have been told by a reliable source that he managed to get 25kg per plant by growing them in a polytunnel in Cornwall!

Making the syrup is very easy, but quite time consuming and energy intensive. You simply juice the tubers in a juicer that’s sturdy enough to handle beetroot. Then you heat the juice in a pan until all the moisture has evaporates and it reduces down to the consistency of maple syrup: a gloopey liquid that oozes slowly off your stirring spoon.

A raw-food website informs me that this syrup counts as raw, since the juice needn’t be heated to more than 40 degrees celcius (104 fahrenheit). We made our yacon syrup on a woodburning stove, so the temperature was very variable and it did come to the boil at one point. I think that all you need to do is to make sure it doesn’t burn at the bottom by stirring it every so often, but the lower the heat the longer it will take to make. It took our burner more than two hours to reduce our yacon juice down to about 500ml of yacon syrup.

We didn’t seal our jars of syrup very well, so it only kept for about two months before developing a very strange smell. The yacon syrup available in our local healthfood shop has a use-by-date of more than a year though, and I presume that if you bottle it and sterilise it as you would bottled fruit then it would keep for a long time. Refrigeration after opening is recommended by professional yacon syrup people, but we don’t have a fridge and our open yacon syrup kept just fine for several weeks.

In any case, the tubers keep well all winter long if kept in a cool, dry place. I ate the last juicy yacon (harvested last December) raw at the end of April, and it still tasted fresh. If you can’t be bothered to make syrup, I recommend slicing yacon thinly and eating it raw immediately. Otherwise it discolours, but that can be stopped with lemon juice if you would like it to keep its nice crispy white colour for longer. Other favourites include using yacon instead of carrots in any carrot cake recipe, or frying it hard with lots of tamari… much simpler and quicker than making syrup!

NOTE - although we usually offer some each year, yacon is only available after November.
No way to pre-order, as we never know what the harvest will be like , so just keep checking the website.

Keep sowing through the summer!

Just a reminder for new gardeners - to avoid getting a huge glut in summer, and then nothing to eat later in winter, it is important to spread out your sowing over the year.

To help you plan your garden over the summer, we have a summer sowing guide, and also a less detailed month by month sowing guide that goes right through the year.

That's it for 2010... until the new catalogue:

We hope you have a really good gardening year and that you manage to save some of your own seed at home, and perhaps even start breeding your own varieties.

Ben, Kate & Felicia, June 2010

(If you've enjoyed this newsletter and you're new to Real Seeds, you might like to have a look back at our earlier newsletters which have lots of articles and some nice recipes in them too.)