12 May 2013

Potato Onion seedlings

I was lucky enough to receive some seed of Kelly Winterton's potato onion seed. With some nurturing, I've got about 15 seedlings up. I've held back the majority of seed to sow next spring, but just had to try some over autumn.
Since I'm going on holidays, I've planted half in the garden, and entrusted half of the seedlings in a pot to the green hands of my mother, who will look after them in my absence.

I've also got one seedling from the topset onion plants that I assiduously de-bulbilled over summer, trying to induce flower set. About 10 seeds resulted, most of them rather thin and weak looking. I got one seedling to survive, and am wondering where to plant it with a chance that it will survive 3 months of neglect.

F3 pea progress

My January and March plantings of my F3 seed from my most promising lines of yellow snows mauve snows and purple snows are just setting pods - but I'm due to go on leave this week for the next 3 months touring the desert and Kimberley. I tried to time my holidays to occur after pod set, but miscalculated. Hope my quickly instructed assistant Craig will document and pod collect in my absence.
There are some very promising lines in the earliest flowerers - a wonderful wobbly podded yellow snom, and lots of purple and mauves to explore - but none seem to be snows at the moment. I've got dwarfs, and disease resistant lines going as well, so hoping for a big growout next spring. I will have 30 metres of row at my new garden, so have decided to commit the whole big bed to peas for spring.

Late pasnip flowering

My parsnip plantings were designed to
  1. cross up some promising lines, and 
  2. do a seed increase of Kral.
The first planting of 4 different varieties was autumn last year - about 14 months ago, with the plan to get some  autumn growth, have plants subjected to a winter regime, then get flowering in the summer. This worked, and I've got lots of potentially crossed up seed.
The second planting to increase Kral was in the early spring about 7 months ago, with the plan to grow them out over summer, over winter this winter just approaching, then collect seed next summer - but the Krals have panicked, and most of them have put up flower stems, with buds forming. Oh woe! I'm worried that winter won't be suitable for seed to mature. And I'm not going to be around for the next 3 months to check progress. Hope they last 'til August.