Current soil temperatures in counties where Met Éireann take measurements. A 7 day average is used as it provides a more stable and reliable reading by smoothing out daily fluctuations. Similarly, readings are taken at a depth of 10cm as it provides a good compromise between the more fluctuating temperatures found nearer the surface due…
Plants which have fruits require wet processing to extract and clean the seed. With vegetables, this applies to the Solanaceae and Cucurbit families. Tomato and cucumber seeds are surrounded by a germination inhibiting sac to prevent them from germinating in the wet environment of their particular fruits. These need fermentation to remove that gelatinous layer….
It would be nice to do proper trials (large plant numbers, randomised blocks, clipboards and the like) but I think plenty can be gleaned from little observational trials. It is a great exercise for any gardener to grow a few varieties of the same crop side by side and see how they differ. The differences…
When seed is sold as “open pollinated” it means that the plants grown from those seeds will be able to pollinate themselves naturally, either through cross or self pollination, and that the next generation of seeds will be ‘true to type’. The most important thing is that open pollinated varieties produce seed that can be…
There are not that many sugar snap pea varieties around and in my experience some of them are very poor, or even wrongly advertised stringy creatures. Until I have the resources to conduct proper systematic trials I am usually just assessing varieties, eh, hand to mouth.. I sourced four varieties this year and have been…
One of the first things would-be seed savers learn is that you ‘cannot save seed from F1 hybrids’. Though usually not true, it is still rarely worth doing as the crops produced from them will be unpredictable in their growth form. Hopefully the following will shed some light on the terminology of F1 seed, why…
My first attempt to ‘collaborate with chefs’ involved begging my friend Yola, who is very handy in the kitchen, to help me deal with more squash than I knew what to do with. I had quite a few kilos which needed using up as I had just screened my squash harvest. After being inside for…
Growing Broad Beans for Drying Recent archaeological digs have shown that fava beans (Vicia faba) were first cultivated in the Levant more than 10,000 years ago. This places them in close company with the domestication and early farming of cereals. They must have provided early farmers with the much needed protein which is lacking from…
Sea beet (Beta maritima) is the wild crop relative to which all beet crops owe their lineage – beetroot, sugar beet, fodder beet and chard/leaf beet. As well as being the progenitor of these cultivated food plants, sea beet is one of the most widely gathered wild foods wherever it is found, a region stretching…
Radish (Raphanus sativus) seed is one of the more fiddly seed to get clean. This is because the seed tends to get bound up in the fibrous innards of the pods. Threshing is the tricky bit. It’s fine to do small amounts by hand just rubbing out the seed but the doesn’t cut it for…