Posted on

Perennial Rye Harvest

Here are some of the seed heads I gathered from the perennial rye plants on a standard sized dinner plate.

These are among the best I found on the plants.  Most plants had empty seed heads, or heads containing only a few or only immature seeds.  The ones in the picture are mostly full.  The main reason for this is the plants are recent crosses made by Tim Peters, and still need to be selected.

Out of about 400 plants, in about 38m2 or 400ft2, I got about 1 kg of seed heads.  After cleaning, the amount of grain and/or seeds would be a little less than this.  I estimate with selected plants it would be possible to get yields about 10 times higher.  What this means is on a fairly small sized suburban plot it should be possible to get enough grain each year for several loaves of bread.

Harvest time was less than an hour, and care for the the plants while growing was really minimal.  It really was almost ‘free’ grain.

Out of the 400 plants I identified and marked about 20 I thought were particularly good, and one in particular that was exceptional compared to the others.  What I plan to do is dig these plants up, and divide the crowns for replanting.   My understanding is each crown contains about 100 separate genetically identical plants that can be used for replanting, and I’ll make rows with each of the crowns to facilitate cross pollination.

I understand it’s possible to bag seed heads together in order to make controlled crosses between two plants, so the one plant I identified as particularly good I’ll try to plant in such a way as to facilitate controlled crosses with the others.  I’ll also plant more of this one in order to promote it’s presence in the overall genepool.

By the way, Nick Routledge recently sent me an email telling me about something he wrote about Tim Peters perennial grains projects.  You can find it here.

I have small amounts of seeds to share with people interested in participating in a breeding project.  You need to have a climate that’s not too different from mine, because it’s what the seeds are now becoming acclimated to.  I live in northern Europe, which is similar to the North American pacific northwest.  Preference is for people in Europe, because there’s no need to worry about customs regulations.  If you live some place else and are interested let me know. I’ll try to find someone else who might have seeds to share with you.

The main issue is I don’t have that many seeds to share, and I want to send them to people who have the best chance of success with them.  In a few years this may be less of an issue, because there might be more people growing the plants who are willing to share seeds.

In particular, these plants are not suitable for very hot and dry climates.  Mike tried them in South Africa, and they were killed by the heat.  Tim Peters also confirmed they were not bred with hot dry climates in mind, but this may be a future breeding effort on his part.

Posted on

Tim Peters Perennial Rye

I’ve posted about this several times before.  Like here.

The more I watch this grow, the more interesting I find it.

It’s another ‘no-weed’ plant, like what I posted about earlier today.  It’s basically grass, and it’s no-weed like most of our lawns are.  It just forms a very thick root mass that almost no weeds can penetrate.  Like grass, I wouldn’t really expect there to be insect or disease problems.  Like grass it can be used as a forage crop, and in fact it grows about 2 meters high, and produces a lot of hay or straw.  For gardeners it’s a useful source of mulch.

It will literally grow anywhere grass grows.  It’s not uncommon to find unselected rye grasses in lawn seed mixes, and rye is not an uncommon component of people’s lawns.  It’s the thicker bladed grass most of us are familiar with.

Okay, I can hear you asking.  If it’s like grass and grows where grass grows, what makes it interesting?  What makes it interesting is that you can eat it!  Literally, anywhere grass grows, this is a drop-in replacement you can eat.

So let me repeat.  Replaces grass, including people’s lawns, is weed, insect and disease free, hardly requires any care, and you can eat it.  When you’re done eating it, any animals you might have can eat it.

If you were to create a major food for a sustainable future, what would you do different?

Posted on

Japanese Gobo

This is a very strange looking plant, almost like a faux Joshua Tree or something.  I got the seeds last year from Alan Kapuler’s seed company, Peace Seeds.  It’s a big plant, about 2.5 meters high.

It didn’t seed the first year, so it’s either biennial or perennial.  If you want to know before me, I’m sure about 30 seconds with Google will give all the details.  These prickly buds are sticky and detach easily.  They’re very annoying if you get too close when weeding, and get one tangled up in your hair.

It’s about to bloom, and I’m planning to save some seeds.  It’s supposed to have a very long root that’s very tasty.  It’s supposed to be popular in Japan.  I’ve seen the roots for sale in Asian supermarkets here, but I’ve never bought one.  I dug up one of my plants last year, but the root was too small to be interesting.  After I harvest some seeds, I’ll dig up another plant and see how the root looks.

Anyone have experiences with this plant?  Anyone have any advice or thoughts?  Recipes?

Posted on

Links

I often meet with people in real life, and immediately get an apology for having not read my blog recently.  Can you imagine?  Have you read all my posts?  How ever much I might get nice feedback from people, and have a lot of people regularly reading my blog, I don’t know anyone who admits to reading my whole blog!

I’m sometimes much worse.  I can go for months without reading any other blog.  I sometimes worry I’ll post something very obvious that everyone else has been talking about for months, and make a fool of myself.

In fact I really appreciate it when people send me emails or leave comments here pointing out things to me I might not otherwise notice, because otherwise I probably wouldn’t notice them!

Anyway, in that spirit, I have a couple of links to blogs I stumbled across lately, but if I’ve missed your blog and you would like me to mention it, please let me know.  Don’t take the lack of my noticing your blog personally in any way, it’s only that I just haven’t spent the time to hunt them all out.

Lass Leben is German for ‘Let Live’, and even if you can’t read German all you have to do is look at the blogroll to see this blog takes a similar approach to gardening as I do.  I met some Germans, Swiss and Austrians recently in Brussels, and I’m wondering if I met this person…  Anyway, if you don’t speak German it’s worth using Google Translate on this blog.

Paul of 16 Wild Acres (or is that Wilde Acres) recently left some comments here.  His blog is about a farming project he starting on and writing about.  I think it’s going to be interesting to follow his efforts.

Posted on

No-Weed Beans

Over the last couple of years I’ve discovered a really interesting variety of beans.

They are Yellow Forest Beans, an old variety that used to be grown in Friesland, in the northern part of the Netherlands and probably parts of Germany too.  They are what Americans would call bush beans and British would call dwarf French beans.

What’s interesting about these beans is they require little or no weeding, at least in my climate!

Ordinarily, this type of bean will grow to smother any weeds, but usually needs a little hand weeding at the beginning or the weeds will overtake them.  This bit of hand weeding at the beginning is most of the work required to grow them!

Below is the bed of beans where I didn’t do any weeding.

You can see a few weeds poking their way through, but it’s not very serious.  Here’s a picture taken straight down.

Okay, because I’m a diligent gardener, I’ll probably do a little weeding here later, but it doesn’t need much!

Here’s a similar bed of beans of a different variety.  Can you see any weeds here?  This is going to be a lot more work.

For the sake of clarity and honesty, I did use a weed burner on both of these beds before planting them, and this does reduce the weeds.  Next year I’ll try the Yellow Forest Beans without burning the ground first, and I expect to see more weeds.

I also haven’t had a chance to eat these beans yet, because I’ve been trying to bulk up on seeds.  I’ll try them in a few weeks.  They may not taste good.

All of these beans above were grown on rich soil, where I’ve grown beans within the last few years and so I know there’s good availability of rhizobia bacteria.  These things are important, because I think the ability of this variety to compete against weeds comes all or partly down to the plant’s vigor.  It’s possible however there’s more than that, for example a growth inhibiting chemical in the roots, that makes weeds grow slower.

Why It’s Important

You might think I’m a lazy gardener, and perhaps that’s part of it, but I do everything I can to avoid pulling weeds or digging in my garden!  The problem is weed seeds, once covered, remain in the ground for decades or even sometimes centuries.  When you disturb the ground, you bring these seeds to the surface where they grow.  This means every time you pull or dig weeds, you’re just creating a self-perpetuating problem.  By using no-dig methods like mulch or weed burning, you reduce this problem.

The problem is even compounded further when you grow something like beans, because they fix nitrogen in the ground, which makes the weeds grow all that much faster!  If you don’t manage the weeds, not only will the beans not grow well, but the benefit of nitrogen fixing will be at least partly lost as the weeds consume it.

On the other hand, if you have a nitrogen fixing crop that smothers weeds and is largely carefree, it’s of much more value to grow, even just as a cover crop!

When it comes down to it, the limiting factor for almost all of us is the amount of effort our garden takes to manage.  By not weeding, much of the effort needed to maintain a garden is gone and we can manage a larger piece of land with more crops if we want.  This is also true commercially, where a variety that needs little or no weeding can make all the difference in profitability.

These days of thinning ozone make me a little worried with every hour I spend in the garden.  Growing anything that requires less weeding means fewer hours in the sun.

After all, all of these benefits of reduced weeds are what make RoundUp ready crops so attractive.  This on the other hand is a sustainable and organic alternative.

The Genetics

Like I mention above, I haven’t tasted these yet.  In many ways, it doesn’t make that much difference if these taste good, but rather I’ve discovered genes that can be used with further breeding.