In the wake of the #MeToo movement, the word “misogynist” is everywhere. Some of these men are in our faces, the leader of the free world for starters. Some are faceless trolls, hiding behind their…

The gardening question which never seems to have an answer is "how long do seeds keep?" The reason it has no answer is that there are so many variables ... how the seeds were harvested, processed and stored, what type of plant it is and probably also an element of luck. Tomato seeds keep longer than carrot seeds, for example, but there are no hard and fast rules. You just have to try them. Take the little beauty in the picture above, photographed last month ... a very rare dark pink Estonian potato-leaf tomato called Siniy. This one came as a freebie from Association Kokopelli as part of their giveaway of out-of-date seeds. I've photographed the seed packet beside it so you can see the date on it: 1998. That's right, this healthy little tomato plant grew from seed which had been sitting in an envelope for 10 years. Admittedly germination is no longer 100%. I sowed three seeds and only one germinated. But that's enough to give me a whole new generation of seeds if this plant survives to maturity. Tomatoes are naturally inbreeding, so saving seed from a single plant (although not ideal) is not a problem. I'm not necessarily recommending out-of-date seeds as being better than, or even as good as, fresh seed. Old seed often has sporadic or very slow germination, and sometimes the plants which do grow are a bit weak and wobbly. But there are many good reasons to keep hold of those old packets. There's not always much point going to the trouble of rescuing old seeds when you can just go out and buy new ones, but I often find myself needing to make the effort. Sometimes I get hold of old seeds of rare varieties which can't easily be replaced. Very often I get seeds in small quantities so I can't afford to waste any. This is one of the very few areas where I disagree with Monty Don, who advocates throwing away any seed packets more than a year old and buying fresh ones. His reasoning is that fresh seed germinates quickly and grows rapidly ... which is true enough. Except that the whole idea of "new" seed being "fresh" is a bit of a myth. Association Kokopelli have a policy of labelling their seeds with the year they were grown, but that's unusual. "Sow by" dates on commercial seed packets are sometimes arbitrary and meaningless. Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots wrote a very informative post about this a little while ago. When it says "packeted in year ended ..." that's exactly what it means – packeted. What year it was actually grown is another matter. As Patrick explains, the seed is likely to have been produced in a single batch in one year and sold as required. A germination test is done and if the seed passes the test then it gets packeted up and sold. The "sow by" date is based on the validity of the germination test and is not necessarily an accurate indication of the freshness or shelf-life of the seed. And naturally seed companies are in no hurry to correct the common misconception that out-of-date seed is unviable, and that you need to go out and buy another lot. In the UK and Europe, where dunderheaded legal restrictions govern the availability of vegetable seeds, readily available varieties often get dropped from the Common Catalogue and when that happens they can become very rare very quickly. The Heritage Seed Library keeps an eye on "deletions" and steps in to rescue them as necessary, but things can slip through the net. In other words, it's possible that the crumpled seed packet you've had languishing at the bottom of your seed tin for years may now be an endangered variety. Another good point is raised by Soren of In The Toad's Garden. If you save your own seed, there is often a risk that a crop might accidentally cross-pollinate with another variety. Not that that's always a bad thing ... it's potentially the start of an exciting new variety. But if you're growing heritage varieties and need to keep the variety pure it can be a disaster. Soren keeps a few generations of seed for each variety, so when an accidental cross happens he can just go back to his seedbox and start again with seed from a couple of generations earlier, before the cross happened. Tomato seeds are especially good to save long term, as they really do last for years. I'm still getting 100% germination from some seeds I scraped out of a Marks & Spencer's tomato onto a piece of kitchen roll in 2002. Back then I didn't know how to save tomato seeds properly so I didn't follow the usual recommended method and ferment them. But what the hell ... they still germinate. Beyond the realm of vegetables, some seeds stay viable for very long periods. Last year, with a little expert care, some seeds from botanical specimens found tucked inside a book for 200 years were successfully germinated. And seeds of the common wild poppy are thought to remain viable for up to 100 years. The incredible display of poppies which bloomed on the First World War battlefields in the years immediately following the armistice was a mass germination of dormant seeds in the soil. Poppies are adapted as a cornfield weed and are sensitive to soil disturbance, so four years of pelting with mortar shells was just what they needed to trigger them off - generations of accumulated seed suddenly brought to life. There have long been claims about peas found in Egyptian tombs still germinating after thousands of years - though personally I'm sceptical about that. It was a well publicised scam in Victorian times which seems to have kept resurfacing over the years. Association Kokopelli sometimes give away packets of old seeds, and I have a lot of fun coaxing them into life. With such a large catalogue of varieties, they inevitably have a stock of unsold seeds which have passed their expected germination time. Rather than throw them away, they give them to gardeners to take pot luck with them. At the moment, for every five packets of seed you buy from their UK website you get a free packet of "old" seeds of the vegetable of your choice. Some don't germinate. But a lot of them do. The Siniy seeds shown above (and incidentally that seedling is now a fine healthy plant) was one of the packets I got free with Dominique Guillet's book a couple of years back. Other 8, 9 and 10-year-old tomato seeds I've had from Kokopelli are also germinating fine. I also have a selection of old seeds from Association Kokopelli's pepper collection. Pepper seeds, in my experience, are not as long-lived as tomato seeds. Some of mine are five years old and not germinating. But the trouble with peppers is that they are very very slow to germinate, and need good warmth and moisture. It's not easy to keep them constantly warm and moist for a month or more, especially when moulds are likely to thrive in similar conditions. So here's what I've been doing to "resurrect" the slow-germinators. An attempt to salvage some old seeds of Georgia Flame, a mildy hot pepper. The brown tint in the kitchen roll is tea! Using tea to assist pepper germination is a tip I picked up on the excellent Chileman website. (Sadly I haven't been able to germinate these.) I cut a thin strip of kitchen roll (that's paper towels to American friends), fold it into a small square and wet it with warm water from a recently boiled kettle. A drop of tea is even better. Then I place the seeds within the folded square and put the whole thing inside a small sealable polythene seed bag. Making sure the seal is tight, I put it somewhere near a radiator and leave it for ages. As you can see in the picture, the advantage of this method is that you don't have to keep opening the bag to see how the seeds are getting on. If you keep opening and resealing the bag, the contents will go mouldy in no time at all. But left sealed it should stay fresh for weeks. You check the seeds by holding the bag up to the light. Any sprouts emerging will be clearly visible. Once the sprouts emerge you will have to unseal the bag and plant them within a few days. A Hungarian Semi-Hot pepper seed brought back from the dead after spending over a month on a bit of moist kitchen roll in a sealed bag. Nothing happened for a month, and then four germinated over the following couple of weeks. Not bad from what had appeared to be a packet of dead seeds.

My last day cycling in Canada, as I got the ferry over to the United States. I stayed the night at Fairholm Campground.

Breeding new potato varieties is easy. You can hand-pollinate potato flowers in far less time than it'll take you to read this article, but I'm going to attempt a reasonably thorough explanation, so I hope you find it helpful. Potato breeding is done through sexual reproduction, i.e. pollinating flowers to produce berries which contain true seeds (TPS). Normally when you plant potatoes you propagate them from tubers, confusingly called seed potatoes but which are not actually seeds, but root cuttings. You can't cross tubers. They can only reproduce themselves as they are. Occasionally a plant may produce a spontaneous mutation but it doesn't happen often enough to be useful as a breeding method. Flowers are the way to go, because they give you the option to combine and reshuffle genes from the parent varieties of your choice. There's a lot to be grateful for in the anatomy of a potato flower. Hand-pollinating them is very easy. The flowers are large and easy to work with, and the individual parts are easy to manipulate. What's not so easy is making careful plans and predictions for what you might get out of it, and that's because potatoes are tetraploid. If you've no idea what I'm talking about then have a look at my previous post about TPS for a simplified explanation. To give a one-sentence summary: a tetraploid has double the amount of genetic material that a normal (diploid) organism has, which is a bit like inheriting traits from four parents rather than two. Tetraploids are a quirk of nature but in potatoes they are a very successful one, and the vast majority of cultivated potatoes in Europe and North America are tetraploid. You may still come across the occasional diploid. Mayan Gold and its associated varieties are diploid, and those who are growing TPS from Tom Wagner may have a few diploid lines from him. Diploid potatoes can be recognised by a tendency to have smaller and less fleshy leaves, but the most distinctive feature is the berry. A diploid potato berry has a distinctively pointed end, kind of strawberry shaped, while tetraploid berries are more rounded and tomato-like. If you're feeling experimental you can try crossing a diploid with a tetraploid. At best you will only get a few viable seeds out of it, but it's a brilliant way of introducing new diversity into potatoes. At some point soon I will give it a whole article of its own, as it's too elaborate a subject to go into here. Potato berries (these are tetraploid ones) in development. However, assuming the potatoes you want to cross are tetraploid, since most of them are, it's very difficult to predict what the resulting offspring will be like because of the genetic variability involved. With tetraploids, the convenient order of the Mendelian ratio is thrown out the window and replaced by something more akin to a gene tombola. F1 hybrids are not uniform as they are in most other types of breeding project. If you grew a lot of offspring from your cross you'd find that many traits show continuous degrees of variation through the population, rather than segregating into Mendel's either/or groups … which happens because there are so many different ways the alleles can arrange themselves. To quote a research paper by Scotland's premier spudmeisters, Meyer et al (1998) "[Tetraploid] inheritance implies the random pairing of four homologous chromosomes at meiosis, and in a highly heterozygous outbreeding species results in a large number of possible allelic combinations at a single locus. In the most extreme case, eight different alleles could segregate independently in a population, resulting in 36 possible genotypic classes in the progeny." In other words, potatoes naturally have a mixed up genepool (from outbreeding) and when they pollinate and set seed those alleles can arrange themselves in any order - with each different combination having a unique effect on how that trait is expressed. And we're just talking about an individual locus here … the same is happening at every other locus throughout the whole genome. Yowza! In short, tetraploids are complex and contain a lot of genetic material which can be immensely variable. Scientists doing genetic research on potatoes often choose to work with diploid lines instead, because tetraploids make such a muddle of their data it's hard to interpret anything. So where does that leave you as a home gardener or small-scale farmer wanting to develop your own potato varieties? It leaves you in a position where you may as well have fun, experiment, use your imagination, be creative. As the results can't easily be predicted, you don't actually need to know anything about genetics. Think more along the lines of what you might get if you cross this colour with that colour, or this flavour with that shape - and then be prepared to be surprised! One piece of misinformation I see spread all over the internet is a belief that you won't get anything worthwhile out of a home-made potato hybrid because producing just one good variety takes thousands of plants and many many years. This myth has arisen from under the slow-grinding wheels of the potato industry, which does work like that. Sure, if you want to breed a variety which will be listed in all the catalogues and sold in Tesco's and will make you rich from the royalties, your chances are very slim. The selection criteria for commercial potato varieties are immensely restrictive - and largely at odds with what most gardeners would want. Commercial breeders may well churn through (and reject) 200,000 seedlings to find one with commercial potential, then spend the next eight years doing field trials with it before it's ready for release. But don't let that put you off. You can breed a good variety within two years - easily. The majority of your home-made potatoes will be worthwhile, at least decent enough to eat and enjoy and feel proud of. A few will be exciting and wonderful. Even if you're only working with a very small patch of garden, you will almost certainly get some tubers that are worth saving and growing on next year. The beautiful thing about potatoes is that it only takes two seasons to get a completely stable new variety. So it's actually quicker than most other vegetables. You make a pollination the first year and produce the F1 seeds, which are all unique individuals because of the genetic diversity. The second year you grow plants from those seeds and they make tubers. If you like the tubers, you simply propagate them by saving and replanting them. As the tubers are basically root cuttings of the parent plant (clones) they are genetically identical. There's no arsing about trying to make F2 and F3 hybrids (unless you want to) or years spent roguing out unwanted recessives. Once you've got something interesting, it's instantly a new variety. Hybrid potato grown from TPS. This is one of Tom Wagner's hybrids, an F3 of Pirampo x Khuchi Akita. The parent varieties are Bolivian landraces, and are diploid. If you've dipped a toe into plant breeding before, you'll know that plants tend to be either inbreeders or outbreeders - though that's more of a sliding scale than a polar absolute. Potatoes are really a bit of both. The natural status of potato is outbreeder. The various (diploid) landrace species from which cultivated potatoes are derived have a self-incompatibility mechanism which prevents them from pollinating themselves. The majority of diploid varieties are self-incompatible, although there are exceptions. This forces them to hybridise and mix their genes up in every generation, hence the wondrous diversity found among diploid landraces. However, when potatoes went tetraploid the compatibility barrier got screwed up somewhat. Many tetraploid potatoes have sterile pollen which can't fertilise anything at all, but others can fertilise themselves as well as each other. So they're designed to be outbreeders, but in practice a lot of flowers simply get knocked up by their own pollen. Which gives you a choice: you can make hybrid seeds by crossing two different varieties, or you can make self-pollinated seeds which are the product of just that one variety. Choosing parents: hybrid or OP? Both are worth experimenting with, but for different reasons. When a potato plant sets berries naturally without your intervention, it's most likely that it self-pollinated, but it may also have made hybrids with other potatoes flowering nearby, and you may have a mixture of selfed and hybrid seeds in the same berry. This is called open pollination (OP) … and the results are basically pot luck. Making a deliberate hybrid is the most usual way to breed a new variety, as it introduces a lot more diversity. The basic method is to emasculate the flower to stop it from pollinating itself (which you don't even need to do if it's one of the many varieties with sterile pollen) and fertilise the female part of the flower with some pollen from a different variety. The offspring will be very varied, but that's the fun part and you should also get some hybrid vigour which makes for healthy and abundant plants. The only problem with this is that so many varieties of potato are poor berry setters, so not all varieties can be hybridised. If you want to grow seeds from one specific variety it can be as simple as saving naturally pollinated berries from it, but if you want to be sure of getting self-pollinated seeds, it's easy enough to do (as long as it's one of the fertile varieties). Just dab a flower with pollen scraped from its own anthers, or other flowers on the same plant, or from other plants of the same variety. Bear in mind though that you will not get a true-breeding offspring of the parent variety by doing so. As potatoes are very heterozygous and have four lots of genetic material to throw around with cheerful abandon, even when they're self-pollinated they segregate into many different phenotypes. If you grow self-pollinated seed from Salad Blue, for example, you will not end up with a lot of spuds which look like Salad Blue. You will get varying shades of blue flesh, some much lighter than the original, some darker, and a few with pinky skin. If you grow selfed seeds from Congo, another blue variety, you may end up with a baffling range of purples, pinks and pure snowy whites, with considerable variation in tuber shape. What's happening is that all the genetic material which has been funnelled into the variety from various ancestors is segregating. Recessive traits emerge which weren't apparent in the variety you started with. If you grow enough self-pollinated offspring, you can start to build up a picture of the variety's pedigree, as many of the ancestral characteristics magically come back to life. So it can be a really fascinating thing to do. A seedling grown from self-pollinated seed of Salad Blue. It's the only plant in the batch which has this striking black tinged foliage and black stems. I'm hoping it'll produce some dark tubers to go with it. It's important to remember though that nature designed potatoes to be outbreeders, and if they self-pollinate they may show some degree of inbreeding depression. Only a bit though. As most spuds have such a rich and diverse genepool they can get away with a certain amount of inbreeding, but you may find self-pollinated seeds grow less vigorously than hybrids. That's not a problem and shouldn't put you off trying self-pollinated seed … but it's better to sow a few more than you need and then select the seedlings which show the most vigour and whoomph. Variety differences Differences in the fertility of individual varieties will most likely dictate what crosses you make, and how you do them. Over many years of being propagated by tubers, cultivated potatoes have moved away from the idea of flowering and producing seeds, and many of them can't be bothered to do it any more. Ironically for such a naturally variable and heterozygous plant, a historic lack of genetic diversity is thought to be the cause of the potato's fertility issues. The vast majority of modern cultivated potatoes are descended from one single Chilean spud, which had what is known as T-type cytoplasm, a genetic predisposition to making offspring with infertile pollen. Over the years many of these semi-infertile lines have been selected deliberately, as the male-sterility makes the process of hybridising them much easier. Consequently an awful lot of modern spuds have infertile pollen, and some are female-sterile too. Some can't be arsed to flower at all, and just dump their buds as soon as they appear. There are things you can do to force a reluctant variety to produce flowers, but it's a lot of hassle which I won't go into here, and from the point of view of future breeding work it makes more sense to choose varieties that at least show some willingness to come up with the goods. I wish I could give a simple list of which variety does what, but I only know about the ones I've grown and observed myself, and it can vary from garden to garden anyway. Different countries have different varieties - import restrictions have affected exchange of material - so the ones I work with in the UK may not be available to people in the USA (just as most popular US varieties are strangers to me). So you will have to experiment with whatever you have available. As far as I can see, varieties fall roughly into four categories. Some potatoes are very fertile and make excellent male or female parent varieties. Salad Blue is the Cassanova of the potato world - it only has to look at another potato and a berry starts swelling. You can usually tell a fertile variety because it naturally sets its own berries in profusion. Desirée is another very fertile one, and so is Mayan Gold, although the latter is a diploid so it needs to find the right kind of partner, or get lucky mating with a tetraploid. Most cultivars fall into the male-sterile or almost-male-sterile category - these are the ones which flower happily enough but don't tend to set berries. Highland Burgundy Red is a good example of this, as is British Queen. It gamely produces a mass of dainty little flowers but in years of growing it I've never had a single berry. Give it a dab of pollen from a fertile variety though, and it sets berries very readily. So it makes an extremely good female parent. The advantage of male-sterile varieties is that you don't have to emasculate them, which makes it much quicker and easier to hand-pollinate them. Some varieties which appear to be male-sterile may actually be female-sterile. So it's worth trying the pollen on another variety to see if it will take. The disadvantage of using these partially sterile varieties is that it perpetuates the poor fertility of potatoes. If you want to do Solanum tuberosum a real favour in your breeding projects, select the progeny for good berry production. Because good berry production is what will keep its genetic heritage alive, as well as enabling some much needed new diversity to come in. Then you have what you might call the awkward buggers category. These include Pink Fir Apple (syn. Rose Finn Apple) which not only has male sterility issues, it often can't be bothered to set a berry even when it's given fertile pollen. What usually happens is that the flower opens happily enough and you carefully pollinate it two or three times and on the third day the whole bloody thing drops off. Or worse, it starts to set a berry and then it falls off before it's mature. It pays to try again though, because there's a good chance that one of the pollinations will take eventually, when the plant is in the right mood and the planets are in the right alignment or there's an 'r' in the month. It's a pain in the backside to have to keep pollinating more flowers, but bearing in mind that each berry can easily produce 100 seeds or more, it only takes one successful pollination to give you loads of future breeding material - so it's worth persevering. Again, with a variety like this you don't need to waste time emasculating. I just go through the whole crop each day dabbing fertile pollen on every stigma I can find and saying "come on, set a bloody berry you sod!" And finally you have the total refuseniks. There is a wonderful Victorian potato called Witch Hill which is reputed to be one of the best flavoured potatoes around - it is truly delicious. I would love to use it in breeding work. But every year the flower buds appear, and just as they're starting to look promising they drop off. All of them. Little dessicated posies cast to the ground. Now, unless it changes its mind, I cannot breed from it. If a variety won't flower, there is no breeding possibility, it's as simple as that. I could grow fields of the stuff and hope for a spontaneous somatic mutation, but that may never happen. Witch Hill is a genetic dead end. This is why breeders like Tom Wagner select breeding lines from varieties which are good berry setters. If a variety won't flower or won't set berries, it has no future. The annoying thing is, Witch Hill did flower for me a couple of times when I first got it (it came to me as a laboratory-grown microplant) but I hadn't got into potato breeding at that time so I didn't think to make any crosses with it. D'oh! Hybridising potatoes: the practical bit Let's be grateful for small mercies: potato flowers are nice and simple and easy to work with. They are 'perfect' flowers which contain both male and female parts. Anatomy of a potato flower. Each of the anthers is a double sac, both halves containing pollen. When the anthers mature they develop little holes in the ends (like a salt cellar) and the pollen falls out onto the stigma. The Mayan Gold blossom shown above is fairly typical, but there are variety differences in the exact shape of the flower. Some have a long style where the stigma protrudes some way out of the flower (be aware that a sticky-outy stigma has more chance of being cross-pollinated by passing insects than one where the stigma is hidden away). Some produce a neat little fused anther cone, others produce a rather grotty collection of misshapen anthers which don't hold together properly. Some (like Pink Fir Apple) do weird things where anthers and petals morph into one another. None of this matters - the principle is the same. You'll get to know the individual character of the flowers in your own garden as you work with them. In order to control what pollen fertilises the flower, you have to stop the flower from fertilising itself, so that means removing the male parts of the flower before they mature. As I explained above, with some varieties you don't need to do this - if the variety produces sterile pollen or none at all, you can save yourself the trouble. The instructions shown here are for if you have a fertile variety or want to be sure of getting hybrid rather than selfed seed. Potato flowers are produced in cymes - bunches of flowers which open consecutively, 2 or 3 at a time. The flowers last two to four days but tend to close up in late afternoon. The anthers develop holes in their tips when they're ready to dehisce, though they're not very glamorous - in fact they look more like some insect has had a go at them. Potato pollen is white, powdery and very fine. The stigma is receptive for about 2 days and the period of pollen shedding also lasts about 2 days. Fortunately for the garden dabbler, the female part tends to become receptive just before the pollen starts to shed, so you have a window of opportunity to intervene. The best time for hand-pollination is in the morning when pollen is most abundant, and when the temperature is fairly cool. But I wouldn't worry too much about this, it works at other times too. If you're using a variety with infertile pollen, or you aren't bothered about the chance of a few self-pollinated seeds, you can skip steps 2 to 4. Step 1: Having chosen the variety you want to use as the female parent, find a blossom at the right stage. Potato pollen can be shed quite early, before the flower opens, so emasculation has to be done while it's still at the bud stage. What you're looking for is a nearly-ready bud where the calyx (outer green bit) has started to open but the petals are still shut. This is a variety with a sticky-outy stigma, but with many varieties it will still be hidden inside the petals. Doesn't matter either way, although a sticky-outy like this inevitably carries a small risk of picking up stray pollen from elsewhere. You may notice a strand of mauve wool poking out underneath. I tied this around the stem of the flower (or in this instance the whole cyme, as I'm going to hand-pollinate all of them) as a marker, so I can be sure I know which ones I've hand-pollinated. I use a different colour of wool to indicate different pollen fathers. Step 2: Peel back the petals and you'll find the anthers inside. They are still immature at this stage - with no holes in the ends. If they do have holes and are shedding pollen, try a slightly younger bud instead! Step 3: Using a blunt scalpel blade, tweezers or similar, pull/scrape the anthers off, being very careful not to damage the style - the central stalk with the stigma at the end. Step 4: After removing all the anthers you're left with a denuded female part, ready to be pollinated with the pollen of your choice. Step 5: Next find the flower you want to use as the male parent. Choose a blossom which is newly opened, as those are the ones most likely to have a good pollen stash (the ends of the anthers should be open at this stage). Pull off a single anther using tweezers/scalpel/fingers. Step 6: When you turn the anther over you'll see it has a seam down the back, separating the two pollen sacs. Additionally, each individual sac has a little slit down its centre. Carefully slip the tip of a blunt scalpel blade through the slit and slide it along. Note that the slit should be open so you can insert the blade freely ... you want to avoid cutting into the anther if you can. If there is pollen inside, you will see it on the tip of the blade. It's a very fine white powder. If you don't see any white powder, try another anther from a different flower. You don't have to collect all the pollen at once ... just scrape out enough to dab on the female flower, and use the rest for more pollinations. (When the first sac is empty you can do the same with the other side. You can often pollinate ten or a dozen flowers from the pollen in a ripe anther like this.) Step 7: Armed with your pollen-tipped scalpel, go back to the bud you just emasculated and dab the pollen powder onto the stigma - which is the knobbly-bobbly thing at the end. The stigma is mildly sticky when it's receptive, so you should find the pollen grains sticking to it quite readily. No need to make a song and dance with it - just a gentle dabbing so as not to risk damaging the stigma. Step 8: The next day, go back to the same flower and pollinate it again with pollen from another fresh anther. The stigma remains receptive for around two days in total but you don't know exactly when that is, so for best results give it a pollen dab on three consecutive days. You'll notice that the petals have opened on this flower now, although it looks a bit weird as it has no anthers. Once the petals have closed and wilted a bit, you can assume it's no longer receptive. Step 9: The berry starts to form. Yay! From this point on, patience is the order of the day. Potato berries seem to mature painfully slowly. Try to resist the temptation to prod and poke them, you don't want them to fall off as they dangle clumsily on their alarmingly scrawny stalks. After about four weeks you need to watch for them dropping off naturally. Ideally, tie a little cloth or paper bag over them at this stage so that they are caught safely if they drop. Alternatively, be very vigilant, and ready to rummage about on the ground if you notice them suddenly go AWOL. Fortunately they don't taste nice enough for animals to be interested in them, at least not in the way of UK garden wildlife, so they're unlikely to be carried off, but you don't want to chance it. One key factor about potato berries, significantly unlike tomatoes (to which they're closely related), is that the seeds carry on developing even after they've detached from the plant, and the berries will stay firm for months. This has several advantages. For one thing it takes the pressure off you to extract the seed from them ... you can leave them until you've got the time and inclination, even weeks or months down the line. Secondly it means that all is not lost if the berry is dropped too early or the plant dies prematurely. This is very significant in the light of the blight problems we are all besieged with. The plants can be struck down by blight, wither and rot - and the berries will still survive. Save the berries and let them mature, and as long as you clean them thoroughly they will yield perfectly healthy seed. The topic of cleaning and processing TPS from the berries is to be the subject of a separate post. In the mean time, go out and make some berries! With thanks to Tom Wagner and friends at the TaterMater forum for advice and suggestions (any errors are entirely my own responsibility).

When you wake up at the cottage on a morning in late summer and your object of desire is coffee, you face a choice. Do you fill a mug and slip out to the porch to sip your brew with a view of the lake? Or do you pick up the mug and head down to the dock for a wake-me-up beside the waves?

Both what leaders do--management--and what they plan for the future--leadership--is faulty today. Performance is low, commitment to excellence is lacking, our expectations are low, unchallenging, and unrealistic. That said, Gilbert W. Fairholm goes on to propose a new philosophical conception of leadership--one that is values-driven, change-oriented, and developmental. Fairholm contends that past theories fail to consider group values as a constraint on leadership performance, and he proposes the constitutional values of respect for life, freedom, happiness, justice, and unity as the basis for a suitable philosophical leadership model. In short, leaders make a priority of one or more of these founding values in addition to any others used in setting their organization's vision. In turn, that vision is the basis of a leader-set organizational culture that applies these values to interpersonal relationships. Values Leadership uses current literature and independent research to provide the rationale for this new thinking on leadership. Divided into three major sections, this twelve-chapter volume reviews the current values-oriented leadership theories; proposes a philosophy of what leaders should think about and value in performing this important, innovative task into the twenty-first century. It details some of the new technologies modern leaders must adopt in striving for excellence in their leadership. The last chapter defines and elaborates the results sought by values leadership theory. Scholars and students in management, public administration, organizational behavior, and psychology as well as professionals in management roles will find this evolving theory of leadership a unique tool for the tasks and missions of the next century.

Some of you may be growing this treasure of a bean this year, as it appeared in the 2010 Heritage Seed Library catalogue - along with a little quote from me because I'm one of the Seed Guardians who looks after this variety. The advantage of being a Seed Guardian meant I got to try it two years before it appeared in the catalogue, and I've already written a detailed review. There hasn't been much point in me promoting it until now because it wasn't available until this year, and I couldn't offer it in any personal seed swaps because the stock I have belongs to the Heritage Seed Library and all the seed I produced went back to them. If you chose this variety then you are in for a treat. I rarely, if ever, proclaim anything to be the "best ever" or single any one thing out as my ultimate favourite, because there are so many varieties that have merits in different areas, and diversity is in itself a blessing. But this is the exception - Major Cook's Bean is the best bean I've ever grown, and I fell completely in love with it. It is the bean that has everything. Genuine multipurpose beans are a rarity. In most cases, there is a trade off between pod quality and bean quality, and you have to decide which you prefer when you choose a variety. Major Cook's Bean is an exception. It has the most exquisitely fat succulent pods with a gourmet flavour and absolutely no trace of fibre whatsoever, so the pods stay sweet and edible even when they're fairly mature. At the same time (even on the same plant) you can harvest mature beans which also have a gourmet flavour and a silky texture and which don't break up when you cook them. The pods are quite curious looking as they have a strong curved shape and are mottled with purple-maroon. To start with the pods are flat and the mottling is quite blue. As they mature they become spectacularly knobbly, and the colour changes to a rich burgundy maroon. What is unusual is that the pods are still delicious after they've gone knobbly. The knobbles are caused by the complete absence of fibre inside, so the pods shrink around the shapes of the beans. The pods are also incredibly thick-walled and juicy, which adds to the knobbly effect even more. They have a strong flavour, but it's sweet and rich and delicious, and the texture is smooth and succulent - and as if that wasn't enough, they are absolutely stringless! Instead of going fibrous when left to mature completely, the inside of the pod develops a soft white layer of fluff, like you get in broad beans, and the outer colour turns almost solid dark maroon. Like all red/blue/purple streaked pods, the colour is not retained on cooking because the pigment (anthocyanin) is water-soluble. It does turn the cooking water a lovely deep blue-green! If you eat the whole beans rather than the pods, you are in for another treat. They will stay intact in a casserole and the texture is buttery and silky, and the flavour rich and sweet. Fresh shelled beans. With the benefit of hindsight, I wouldn't harvest them this young. It's a waste of the good pods. The beans are at their best when fully mature and will eventually dry down to a creamy white with maroon speckles. As a garden plant, Major Cook's Bean is not the most elegant but it more than makes up for it with its vigour. In my garden it has been completely untroubled by any pests, and although quite a few snails took up residence in its voluptuous foliage they didn't seem to do it any damage. The yields were stupendous. Even without regular picking (since I was growing it for seed I only picked a very few pods before maturity) it produced a totally mad number of pods and kept on going well into the autumn. The leaves are very large, bright green and coarse, and feel rough to the touch. They have large stipules and are prone to composites with four or five leaf lobes instead of the usual three. The flowers are mauve and quite pretty. When the pods are produced and the plants are covered with their burgundy-streaked crescents, they look much more attractive. The catalogue description gives a little of the bean's history. It was donated to the Heritage Seed Library by Mr Luxton, who got them from his father in 1960. Mr Luxton senior had worked for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission and was given the bean by a colleague, Major Cook. The catalogue suggests this happened in the 1920s but this has now been corrected - it was actually the 1950s. In my original review I thanked Major Cook "whoever he may be" for his discernment in selecting this bean and preserving it for the future. Well I now know a bit more about who he was. I was recently contacted by his son Phil, who told me this: "Major Cook was my father. Trained at Kew, London, where he was a Student in 1939. His first job was to train people to grow their own food as part of the war effort. Then he joined up in the Army in 1940, to be sent to various Arab nations on various missions for 5 years. By 1945 he was a Major. He was tasked by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission with building the Cemeteries in Normandy, France, after the landings, and later to assist in rebuilding the 1st world war cemeteries in France. Living in Albert, Somme, where Mr Harold “Lucky” Luxton was his right hand man. Also where I and my sister also grew up, from 1952 until 1970. We remember Mr. “Lucky” well. The bean was probably much older however and could have come from Major H.V.Vokes, who was the first Horticultural Officer for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission in 1920. (He was an uncle of Major Cook). The bean may even be older, in that Major Cook’s grandfather was also an experimental horticulturalist, he was Alderman F. Vokes, Sheriff of Southampton, UK, winner of over 1100 cups/awards for horticulture and there is a flower park named after him near the docks in Southampton." Major Cook's Bean may originally have been developed by his grandfather, Alderman Vokes I was intrigued to learn that Major Cook had lived in Albert on the Somme, because it's a place with a very special significance to me. I went there in 1996 during a pilgrimage to the battlefields, originally on the trail of Wilfred Owen who is among my very favourite poets, but it led on to other things. After visiting Albert I had some very strange and powerful dreams, and when I got home it all splurged out in the form of a play set in the WW1 trenches. The play got picked up by a professional theatre producer and premièred at the Grace Theatre in Battersea, London, in 1998. That's my little claim to fame - and for a while it looked like I had a literary career in front of me. Three years later I came out with a novel also set in WW1, with large parts of it set in Albert, but by that time my agent had sodded off (as agents do) and I wasn't able to place it anywhere. But that's a whinge for another day. What's even more curious is that Phil's message arrived at the very same time I was scanning my Somme slides, as part of an ongoing effort to digitise my archive of film photographs taken during the 20 years before I went digital. I was literally right in the middle of sorting out the Albert pictures. Albert became an iconic town during the first world war. It was an important strategic base and control centre for British troops, and consequently became a target for heavy bombardment. What was ironic was the town's motto Vis Mea Ferrum - my strength is in iron - adopted during the heyday of its local iron foundry, and which had something of a hollow ring to it by 1916 when heavy iron artillery shells had pounded most of the town to rubble. The basilica in the market square was topped by a gilded statue of the virgin holding the infant Jesus, his arms outstretched, high above her head. In early 1915 the tower was struck by a shell and the golden virgin lurched over, but remained attached to a tangle of metal which kept her suspended over the town square as if she was on a clockspring. She looked as if she was trying to hurl herself and the baby Jesus into the rubble below. Or blessing the chaos, depending how you look at it. It was a deeply striking image which was visible for miles around, and a superstition soon arose that whichever side shot her down would lose the war. Consequently she stayed up - despite more than three years of relentless bombardment in which the rest of the basilica was pulverised. The superstition turned out to be unfounded: it was the British artillery who finally shot her down in 1918 when Albert was briefly taken over by the Germans and there was concern that the tower would be used as an observation post. The statue was never found. After the war the town was rebuilt, and the basilica reconstructed with a new (upright) madonna. Even now it's not hard to find the lingering scars … pockmarked bricks on the lower walls of buildings everywhere you look. The town of Albert, Somme, where Major Cook was based. I took this photo while I was touring the battlefields in 1996. It shows a commemorative mural of the skydiving madonna, and the rebuilt basilica with the new statue on the top. This first world war postcard shows what the basilica and golden virgin looked like in 1915, after a year of bombardment. You can imagine what state it was in by the end of the war. During his time in Albert after WW2, Major Cook was superintendant of all the CWGC cemeteries in the Somme area. He gardened on a bombed out factory floor and operated a no-dig system (with compost and chicken/rabbit manure) which kept him self-sufficient in vegetables. He was an accomplished horticulturalist who collected and experimented widely, keeping a careful note of where each plant had come from. Another of his credits is the discovery of the Golden Leylandii, which he found growing in one of the cemeteries as a result of a natural hybrid. He promoted the use of evergreens in the CWGC cemeteries after the wipeout from Dutch Elm Disease. As for Mr "Lucky" Luxton, whose family maintained the bean for the next 50 years and donated it to the Heritage Seed Library, he was a veteran of WW1 and spent most of his life with two bullets lodged in his chest. He'd survived a pelting of machine-gun fire which had hit him in the chest four times. Two of the bullets were removed but the other two were too close to his heart and had to stay there. One of the cemeteries formerly cared for by Major Cook and Mr Luxton, photographed in 1996. The CWGC cemeteries are laid out as gardens, with immaculately maintained flower borders along the front of the graves. This is Dantzig Alley cemetery near Mametz, a few miles from Albert. Behind the wall are cornfields which were once the battlefields of the Somme. My thanks to Phil for making the effort to get in touch and tell me about his father's work.

When you wake up at the cottage on a morning in late summer and your object of desire is coffee, you face a choice. Do you fill a mug and slip out to the porch to sip your brew with a view of the lake? Or do you pick up the mug and head down to the dock for a wake-me-up beside the waves?

White beetroot, a modern version of a centuries old variety called Albina Vereduna, and two 19th century varieties, Golden with orange skin and yellow flesh, and the curiously exotic Egyptian Turnip Rooted. This week I've made the first of what I hope will be many appearances on the Alternative Kitchen Garden podcast, presented by Emma of Fluffius Muppetus. I'm going to be doing a few reviews of different heritage vegetables and suggesting the best varieties to look out for. This week I'm looking at heritage beetroot of assorted colours and shapes, including the three in the photos.

Banff and Lake Louise are well known for their world-class ski resorts, but here are eight more reasons to visit these picturesque settlements in winter.

My last day cycling in Canada, as I got the ferry over to the United States. I stayed the night at Fairholm Campground.

When you wake up at the cottage on a morning in late summer and your object of desire is coffee, you face a choice. Do you fill a mug and slip out to the porch to sip your brew with a view of the lake? Or do you pick up the mug and head down to the dock for a wake-me-up beside the waves?

A disturbing look into the MRA group, Mothers of Sons.

A diversity of beans. I grew all these varieties in the garden last year. Top row, left to right: Coco Bicolour, Nun's Belly Button, Early Warwick. Middle row: Purple Queen, Purple Prince, Mrs Fortune's. Bottom row: Spagna Bianco, Vermont Cranberry, Caseknife. Beans are a joyous thing to grow. They make such a big fanfare when they emerge from the ground. Huge fat fleshy cotyledons which don't look like leaves at all. And then a slightly prehistoric appearance as the true leaves unfold from inside. You can't miss 'em. And neither can the slugs, unfortunately. I'm having serious problems with the slugs at the moment, as a lot of other Brits probably are. We've had a lot of alternating heavy rain and bright sunshine, which has brought the plants (and weeds) on a treat. Lots of fresh new growth = gastropod party time. After a drawn-out and very dry spring season, a dousing of rain has suddenly brought them all out of hibernation and they are hungry. All my breeding projects are under assault. Ulluco, razed at ground level every time a shoot emerges. I've lost my entire crop of onions, which included some rare and hard-to-get varieties, and it's too late to start again. Nurtured since January, wiped out in a single night. Young bean plants are very vulnerable when first planted out. Some snails like to work their way up the stem stripping off the outer layer, and then pointlessly chomp through a leaf stalk so the whole leaf falls off. Other times the slimy little sods don't bother with all that and just shin up the bamboo cane to mangle the leaves directly. I've been planting out loads of beans this week and I'm doing my best to keep them alive. I have had to sow a few replacements, but hopefully if we have a few days of dry weather the survivors will get properly established and the slugs will cease to bother them. I've collected rather more beans than I've got room to grow but I'm managing to find space for most of them, and the rest can wait till next year. French beans in Rootrainers. The emerging seedling is Poletschka (thanks Celia) which grows from amazingly beautiful indigo-black glossy seeds ... and the pink stems beside it belong to Jo's Purple Podded, an ongoing breeding project distributed by the Irish Seed Savers Association. Most of the varieties I'm growing are climbers. I don't grow very many dwarf beans because of the slug problem ... the low-slung pods are easy pickings for them. I also find the yields very poor for the amount of space they take up and they often give back barely a handful more beans than I sowed to start with. But there are some interesting varieties which don't have any equivalent among the climbing types, so I make an exception for those. Two new dwarfs I'm trying this year are Black Valentine, a variety from the 1850s with small but pretty black kidney beans, and Comtesse de Chambord with even smaller shiny white beans. Indeed Comtesse de Chambord is something very different, as it's what's known as a rice bean ... the white beans are tiny enough and elongated enough to look a bit like rice grains (pudding rice, anyway). Actually they aren't quite that small but they're pretty tiny as beans go. They're reputed to have an excellent flavour but they're not grown commercially because their tiny size and delicate plants make them uneconomic. So if you want them you have to grow your own. I got my seeds from Association Kokopelli. Newly emerged seedlings of Comtesse de Chambord, which look a bit like little bug-eyed monsters while they still have their yellow cotyledons. They grow into small, delicate plants of a very bright green and the pods can be used for green beans or left for shelling. By way of contrast, these are the emerging seedlings of a supersize Australian climbing variety called Purple Giant. This one is mainly grown for its purple pods and the seeds are flat and fairly small. With the weather being so clement they've grown rapidly in the last few days but I can't plant them out yet because I don't have any tall enough poles. I can only buy bamboo canes of a maximum of 7ft because anything bigger than that won't fit in my car. I'm having to borrow some extra-long poles from my neighbour. He has a bigger car. Purple Giant emerges. The one on the right is more strongly purple than all its siblings, though otherwise it looks true to type. I'm always on the lookout for natural variations and mutations in beans, because breeding them the same way I do peas is not convenient ... the anatomy of the flowers makes them incredibly difficult to hand-pollinate. However, some of the most dramatic variations are no use for breeding because they're not genetic. That includes the curious phenomenon of occasional bean colour reversal, or "day for night" to give it a more romantic name, where (for example) a batch of tan beans with purple markings has the occasional purple bean with tan markings. Many heirloom varieties seem to display this trait. Last year I picked out all the "day for night" beans from a batch of Mrs Fortune's and sowed them separately. The result was exactly the same as if I'd sown any normal Mrs Fortune's beans, i.e. the usual colour and a few with reversed colours. Afterwards I spoke to a couple of other bloggers who had had the same experience, picking out the reversed beans from other varieties only to find they grew into the same plants regardless. So something other than genes much be responsible for the colour reversal, but what? Moisture levels inside the pods and exposure to light and air during harvest might be factors, but in all honesty I've no idea. More bean diversity. Top row, left to right: Jo's Purple Podded, Black Valentine, Lazy Housewife. Middle row: Canadian Wonder, Dog Bean, Poletschka. Bottom row: Pea Bean, Kew Blue, San Antonio.

This is one of my hand-made hybrids, Mr Bethell's Purple Podded x Alderman being grown for seed I've now started harvesting some of the pods from my hand-pollinations, at least the ones that have had longest to mature. It takes about 5-7 weeks for peas to produce fully mature pods, depending on the variety, the weather, the growing conditions and how early in the season they were pollinated (the earliest flowers on the plants will usually produce the best seed, but may take longer to develop). If you look at any seed saving guide, the received wisdom for peas is to leave them on the plant until they're fully dry, i.e. when the pods are brown and crisp and the peas inside are starting to rattle. And that's perfectly good advice if you're bulk-saving seed from a whole crop, especially if the weather is dry in the time leading up to harvest. But if you've put a lot of work into doing hand-pollinations then every pod matters, so I tend to harvest them individually as soon as they reach maturity. Maturing pods of Kent Blue, which are unusually knobbly so you can see clearly how the baby peas are getting on With tall peas it's very obvious when they have reached the end of their productive season. Their first step is to stop flowering, or produce only tiny unproductive buds. And then they flop. Big time. You should see my Golden Sweet crop now ... no sooner had I posted the picture of it standing six feet tall and full of bounty when it just collapsed, more or less overnight. It's now leaning over its bamboo frame in a great sagging heap. And damned heavy it is too, like a dead weight ... and one that makes a strange squeaking noise as the stems rub together. It doesn't look very glamorous but it's a perfectly natural event. Pea plants are short-season annuals and as soon as they've completed their production they naturally keel over and die. In my experience, and this may be related to my garden's climate, the plants and the pods are vulnerable to a few problems at this stage. Once they've sagged, all the leaves and pods are pressed together and not very well ventilated, so if the weather is moist they can suffer with mould and mildew. Snails also like to crawl up and hide in the leafmass, where they seem to take a special liking to the mature pods even more than the young and tender ones, and chew great lumps out of them. These problems are obviously worse in damp weather, and if there's a lot of rain it's possible for the peas themselves to swell too quickly for their skins, and split open. It's also around this time of the season that the larvae of pea moths pupate and drop out into the soil to wreak havoc next year. It takes a while for the pods to dry completely on the plant, but a while before that they go through a phase when the pod starts to change colour slightly or look a bit washed out and the surface goes leathery. The calyx (that's the little pixie hat at the top) dries up and withers, and the top of the pod starts to look a bit dehydrated and sunken where it joins on to the stem. (Picture on the right shows Carruthers' Purple Podded just approaching that stage.) I asked myself what message the plant is giving to the pods when this happens. I think the message is basically "right, that's yer lot!" The plant has been nourishing the pod all this while and now it's starting to withdraw its support. Any further nourishment and moisture the peas need have to be drawn from the pod itself, which is why the pod starts to look so leathery and drained. If the peas are no longer receiving moisture from the plant then there's no particular reason to leave them on the plant, as far as I can see. So my rule of thumb is to harvest each pod when the calyx has withered, because the peas will have developed as much as they're ever going to, and may as well finish drying in a sheltered place. Once harvested you can just leave the pods to dry out naturally, and shell them out when they've gone crispy. It normally takes three or four days at room temperature for the pods to dry down, and then they start to shrivel quite rapidly. (The peas themselves will take a while longer.) However, I do sometimes pop the pods open. Not to remove the peas ... I prefer to leave them attached to the inside of the pod until they detach themselves naturally ... but just to keep them well ventilated. I started doing this because I have had some go mouldy on the inside of the pod, which spoils the peas. The other reason is the dreaded pea moth. It's not at all unusual for these maggoty little blighters to pop their heads out of peas shortly after harvest. One of the signs of their presence is a brownish patch on the pea itself so it's a good idea to remove any peas which have brown patches. Once the grubs start to pupate they gnaw their way out of the pea, leaving a small round hole and a lot of brownish powdery debris. Do watch out for them because they are destructive little buggers and will often maraud their way through the whole pod. Coloured threads tied around the flowers when I hand-pollinate them enable me to identify the different hybrids at harvest time. If you're going to save the peas to plant next year, leave them until they are completely dry before bagging them up. The noise they make when (gently!) dropped against a hard surface is the easiest way to tell. They should land with a hard clack. Any hint of a dull thud is a sign of moisture. However, if you're planning to plant them immediately you don't need to dry them out fully. You can plant them straight away, although I've personally had more success by drying them down at least partially before sowing them. I know it seems a bit pointless to waste time drying them out and then waste more time rehydrating them, but I assume some chemical change takes place because they seem much more willing to germinate from a dry or semi-dry state. Why would you want to plant them straight away? It's sometimes possible to get two generations of a pea crop into a single British season. Unlike things like peppers and tomatoes, which need a complete seasonal cycle to do their stuff and are sensitive to changes in day length, peas complete their business within a short and fairly standard timeframe regardless of what time of year they're sown, as long as the weather doesn't mess them up. In the UK, a crop sown in late February or early March can produce seed by the end of June which can be sown straight away for a crop around September or early October. Some varieties do better at this than others, and there's always a risk of sudden bad weather causing problems ... so it's probably only worth doing if you're an impatient plant breeder like me, wanting to grow out the F1 generation as quickly as possible so I can get on to the far more interesting F2 generation.

Clockwise from bottom left: Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy, Salad Blue, Highland Burgundy Red, Witch Hill Yesterday we actually had a period of about three hours between bouts of rain (wow!) so I went out and harvested all the Witch Hill potatoes and a few plants of each of my other heritage types. They are almost ready for harvest anyway, but this is kind of an emergency measure ... now that blight has arrived in the garden I need to gather some tubers before they get infected. I'm relying on home-saved tubers for my crops from year to year (because these varieties can't be obtained easily and certainly not as seed potatoes) so I need to rescue some smallish tubers which are still healthy enough to survive indoors till next spring. If the blight gets to them they'll rot in storage. I've got a very nice colourful crop. None more so than Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy, which I'm growing for the third time and it continues to keep itself at the top of my favourites list. I still get an immense thrill from seeing these glowing pink white and purple swirly things appearing out of the soil and it remains the most striking looking potato I've ever seen. And it's thrived in my garden and given me abundant yields, all in beautiful condition. I'll be very interested to find out whether John shares my enthusiasm for it or not when he harvests his crop! Witch Hill is a creamy white potato also known as Snowdrop. It's thought to have originated in the English midlands some time around the 1880s. It's a favourite of the staff at the Heligan Gardens (their raving about it in their book was the main reason I was so keen to try it) and apparently also beloved of those who maintain the spud National Collection. My harvest of Witch Hill If you were reading my blog last summer you may remember the measly collection of tiddly scabby spuds I got from last year's Witch Hill crop. It was pathetic. I'd bought them as microplants the year before and got only six tiny tubers to show for it. Those six tiny tubers grew into fairly decent plants but were relentlessly eaten down to the ground by slugs, resulting in the aforementioned scabby specimens, which at harvest time were barely enough to fill an eggbox. But I had high hopes that if I kept them and replanted them they would be big enough to produce a full size crop this year ... and they have. So, it's taken three seasons to get from microplant to decent yield, but I now have some very lovely Witch Hill potatoes and not a scab or a wireworm to be seen. A lot of hassle for a potato crop? Yes. But Witch Hill, along with Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy and many other rare heritage potatoes, is only available in the form of microplants. In Europe it's illegal to sell seed potatoes of unregistered varieties such as these. They've only recently been made available thanks to Alan Romans who is taking advantage of a loophole in the law by selling them as ready-started plants rather than seeds, propagated in a laboratory to ensure they're virus-free. They can be found in several catalogues now including Thompson & Morgan, but they all originate from Alan Romans so you may as well save some cash by buying from him direct. A closer view of Salad Blue and Highland Burgundy Red Want to save your own seed potatoes to plant again next year? Here's what to do. When you harvest the crop, choose a few firm healthy ones which are about the size of a bantam's egg. (If that doesn't mean anything to you, think something a bit smaller than a hen's egg.) Size isn't really that important though ... the main thing is to select the ones that look as undamaged as possible. A few scabs aren't anything to worry about, but avoid any that are cut or nibbled by critters. Either leave them to dry and then brush the soil off, or wash them carefully, taking care not to harm the tiny sprout-buds in the eyes (they are fairly robust unless subjected to overzealous scrubbing). Allow them to dry and then put them in a bright place for several days to 'green' them up a little. A window sill or a dry place outdoors will do nicely. This process helps to trigger dormancy, so the spuds have a better chance of getting through the winter without premature sprouting. Then store them in a dark, dry, airy place till next year. What I usually do is put them in eggboxes, or arrange them upright in a cardboard box with some kind of packing material to separate them, such as shredded paper, hay or sawdust. The bottom line is, potatoes are survivors. They will grow on compost heaps, at the bottoms of sacks, in wetness, in drought, in darkness and just about anywhere else. They can take root from peelings and cut tubers. I've had decent crops from even the most pathetic looking specimens. I've read in various places that you shouldn't save your own seed potato tubers from year to year because they are likely to build up viruses and get worse and worse over time until the crop fails ... therefore you should buy new certified virus-free stock each year. There may be some wisdom in that, but personally I've been planting home-saved tubers for years and have never had any problems. If anything the plants do better because they're adapted to my garden. All these will make nice seed potatoes for next year. Front row is Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy with Witch Hill behind. Another thing I've done many times despite all the finger-wagging advice to the contrary is plant supermarket tubers, i.e. potatoes intended for consumption rather than seed. I've never had any problems with them and the biggest potato yield I ever had came from some Tesco's Desiree which I found sprouting in a bag in the pits of my vegetable rack. Many commercially available potatoes are quite boring so you may not want to plant them, but if you see something unusual and want to try growing it, I don't see why you shouldn't. My crops of Salad Blue, Highland Burgundy Red, Shetland Black and last year's Edzell Blue and Fortyfold all came from Waitrose. (And where do Waitrose get them? That'll be down to Alan Romans again. He is truly a crusader for the cause of heritage spuds.) My one tip is to buy them in the late summer or autumn when they're in season and store them overwinter yourself. That's because potatoes bought "fresh" in the spring may well be old ones which have been treated to stop them sprouting in storage. And Waitrose don't seem to stock the exciting heritage varieties in spring anyway, so if you don't buy them early enough you may miss out. Potatoes have beautiful flowers! Highland Burgundy Red with Salad Blue in the background.

An unnamed/unidentified South American andigena potato. The carmine-red splodges in the leaf axils give a clue to the deep red tubers it will produce. So here's some positive stuff I've been getting on with. I've had some very generous potato donations from Rhizowen and Frank Van Keirsbilck, which I'm watching with great excitement as they grow. They include several colourful specimens of South American andigena (I think) types, a rare phureja variety, and some Maori (Taewa) potatoes which Frank grew from seed sent to him by a gardener in New Zealand. Being seed-grown they are "Frank originals" rather than named varieties, but I am happy with that. To me, a reshuffling of the genes of Maori potatoes is just as interesting as getting hold of existing heritage types, because it shows a lot of detail about the ancestry of these potatoes as the various parental traits segregate out. I'm very excited about them as they are very hard to get hold of outside New Zealand. It's a little difficult to tell what the spuds will look like, as all potatoes at this time of year look like brown wizened prunes regardless of what cheerful colours they might have had at harvest, so I will have to wait and see. But one seems to be a dusky ultra-purple and another a reddish bicolour. Among the South Americans there is a similar range of colour loveliness, including an unnamed pink and yellow bicolour and a black and tan bicolour called Puca Quitish. It's going to be a fun year for bizarre-coloured mash in the Rebsie household. This is Pastusa Amarilla, a phureja-type potato from Owen. As the tubers were small I started them off in modules, where they grew like rockets, and this one had already begun to set some tiny tubers of its own by the time I planted them out. I've not yet had time to blog about my TPS-grown potatoes from last year, and there's so much to say I don't know where to start. There were lots of fascinating colours and exquisite flavours, and some amazingly high yields considering the plants were seedlings and not grown from tubers. A great many tubers produced by last year's seedlings are now replanted and growing for the first time as tuber-grown plants. Some are HUGE ... in fact the biggest and most vigorous potato plants I've ever grown. This may be down to the fact that freshly created potato varieties are relatively virus-free. The more established varieties, unless you get planting stock which has been "cleaned" in a laboratory, will have become burdened with a collection of energy-sapping pathogens over the years. It could also be an effect of hybrid vigour, but that's probably less of a factor in potatoes than in other plants, because essentially all potatoes are hybrids. Their tetraploid (doubled chromosome) structure keeps their genes banging around like a pinball machine in every seed. Hybrid vigour is the norm in most potatoes, which is why they're such a successful food crop, and you should theoretically only see a drop in vigour if you inbreed them, i.e. grow seeds which have self-pollinated. But in an illustration of how nature likes to raise two green fingers to such predictions, the most rampant batch of triffid-aspiring monster spuds I currently have in the garden is an inbred line from self-pollinated berries of Mr Little's Yetholm Gypsy. These little beauties deserve a whole post of their own as they are wonderful, colourful and precious. One of the most interesting potatoes-from-seed I have on the go is from a cross of primitive stenotomum cultivars, Pirampo x Khuchi Akita. This is an F3 "novelty line" from Tom Wagner, a cross of two traditional Andean potatoes which are not adapted to temperate zones such as Europe but are still fun to experiment with. I have been erroneously describing them as Bolivian, when in fact only Khuchi Akita is from Bolivia, and Pirampo originates in Peru. Any road, this hybrid is diploid, so it lacks the chromosome doubling which gives cultivated potatoes their big tubers and high yields. It's also limited in its ability to set tubers in the British climate, so I couldn't be sure that the plants I grew from TPS would give me any potatoes at all. But they did give me one very big surprise. They were completely and quite astoundingly blight resistant. Last September I watched as all the potato haulms in the garden turned brown and rotted, including the ones which I was trialling for possible blight resistance as they had been bred to contain the resistance genes. Fortunately the blight in 2010 was late enough that it didn't curtail tuber production, and I got a good harvest, and was able to simply stand back and watch to see how the blight affected different varieties at different speeds. I had twelve plants of Pirampo x Khuchi Akita, in various parts of the garden, and there was not a speck of blight on any of them. They just sat there defiantly while the plague raged all around them, and then, as a final "sod you" gesture to Phytophthora infestans they put on a second flush of flowers just as I was scraping up the blackened corpses of every other potato in the garden. They were still flowering in October when the first frosts came. Their flowers were beautiful too, have a look at these ... Pirampo x Khuchi Akita potato blossom, 2010. I was really surprised, because I wasn't expecting this hybrid to show any blight resistance at all. There are a few species of near-wild Andean potatoes which are blight resistant, but not these; these are technically the same species as normal cultivated potatoes, just a less developed form of it. I'm still not entirely convinced that the resistance is genetic, and will have to see what happens to them this year before I allow myself to get too excited. But it does at least illustrate why I'm keen to experiment with unusual varieties like this. As it turned out, about half the plants managed to set tubers. This is a pretty good achievement for an Andean landrace type, because they are dependent on daylength, and the long daylength in Europe is completely wrong for them. Consequently they don't start to tuberise until the days shorten in the autumn, by which point they don't have time to do anything before the frosts hit them. What I'm looking for in these plants is the odd one or two which can tuberise successfully in our long summer days. It's one of those things which is self-selecting by default and doesn't require much intellectual input from a plant breeder – if it doesn't tuberise effectively then it can't survive to the following year. Extreme Darwin in action. Another self-selecting trait is the keeping quality, since a short shelf-life is common in Andean potatoes. It's often possible for farmers in South America to grow a continuous cycle of potato crops, perhaps two or three a year, so they don't need to be stored for any period of time. They are just replanted shortly after harvest and off they go again. Can't do that in England though, unless you want to grow a crop of frost-bitten stumps. So I can only regrow the ones which stay alive in storage for six to eight months. This weeded out several of my Pirampo x Khuchi Akita beauties, unfortunately. The tubers I got from the plants were small, deep-eyed, immensely variable in size (but still small) and not very abundant. However they did come in some absolutely glorious colours and markings, mostly reds, purples and intense carmine pinks. Alas, this beautiful purple bicolour was among the ones which didn't make it through the winter. I didn't even get a chance to taste it as it was so pitifully low yielding. But I feel blessed to have had it enter my life, however briefly. This one was a lot more promising. It's a bright red one with yellow eyes, though it doesn't look its best in this shot because it's unwashed. (Washing potato tubers considerably reduces the chance of them keeping over winter.) This was by far the best yielding of the lot - a pretty respectable harvest for a diploid landrace type. Only the largest tubers succeeded in surviving over winter, but survive they did ... And this is what they look like now, blossoming like mad already. Notice that the flowers are more of a mauve colour than the magenta-purple blossom shown above. The flower colours did vary somewhat between siblings in this hybrid, though they were all somewhere on the mauve to purple spectrum.