Seasonal Ontario Food

 

Well so much for my plan to post regularly about our breeding projects here. However, while I still have some memory of the last season, I will try to make a few notes. 

The above photo shows the cauliflower bed at the end of April. Of the 72 plants that went in in the middle of March, the dozen survivors have been collared with tin cans or plastic pop bottles to allow me to keep track of them. The second batch of seedlings went in right after I took the photo. 

My plan to have them go through a "winter" after a "summer" indoors in order to stimulate bolting did not really work out. Firstly, I don't have enough light and warmth to really fool them, I don't think. And secondly, I did not expect my mini-winter to include a week of -10°C, 4" of snow, and howling wind that ripped the cloth cover we put over them to shreds. Hence the abysmal survival rate.

Here are the cauliflowers in mid-September. I was able to collect a decent quantity of seed from 4 plants. Three of them were winter survivors. However, I do not conclude that being a winter survivor increased the chances of producing seeds. They were all from seedlings of the variety Pusa Meghna, the only cauliflower we have previously been able to save seed from. The last plant we got seed from was neither a winter survivor nor Pusa Meghna - it was either Goodman or Early Snowball. I jammed then in so closely together in order to maximize the number of potential parents that I was unable to keep track of the rows once they started flopping around. 

I say seedlings of Pusa Meghna; at least one if not two of them showed signs of being crossed with broccoli. I don't remember broccoli being in bloom when we saved that seed, but plainly there was.

There were a large number of other plants which flowered, although few of them early enough to contribute to the seeds collected. There were 4 more plants from which I collected seed pods at the end of the season, but very little of that seems mature enough to be viable. It is quite dismaying to me how very, very slow cauliflowers generally are to go through the flowering and seed maturing process. Most of these started forming heads in July and were not mature by early December. 

As expected collecting cauliflower in this climate is a tough nut to crack. However, we will try again this year and have plenty of seed including more variety in our own saved seed. Quality of plants is likely to be an issue, although cauliflower and broccoli have plainly met before so I am not too worried about that aspect of things. All of this years cauliflowers have been left in the ground in the hope that some may survive the winter and flower next season, but so far that is a thing that has never happened so counts more as procrastination than an actual plan. 

This is a cross between Knight and Strike peas, both very early fairly determinate pea varies. It resembles Knight more than Strike, but it seems even more determinate than Knight, like Strike, and possibly a few days earlier, like Strike. This is important because we want to get our determinate peas in and out of the garden as quickly as possible, so we can follow them with short-season dry bush beans. We have just long enough of a season to make this possible, although we get some bean failure many years if the season is cool or we have an early frost. Every day earlier helps, believe it or not.

We are selecting plants for best production and it may become our main early pea if it continues to do well. These early peas are frozen for use in the winter, so the more the merrier!

The leek project is not going so well. Here I am removing the least impressive leeks to allow the rest to go to seed. It all looks very promising right now. Things went downhill, though. We collected very little seed because the remaining leeks did not overlap well in their flowering time and at any rate I think I have cut the number going to seed down below their tolerance. I need a bigger space for this project where I can grow about 10 times as many. 

To recap, these are leeks where we are planting the seed in the fall, allowing them to come up and grow at their own pace, then replanting the best deeply to produce the long white stalks that leeks are known for. Usually they are started indoors and planted out in the spring before being replanted in early July. They are quite a lot of work and our method reduces it a lot. However, we have only ever found one variety that will overwinter outside as seed, and the subsequent plants are extremely variable. We have crossed them with 3 other varieties, and are attempting to select for the largest and best overwintering plants. However we plainly need to allot them more space if we are to get the number of plants needed for good genetic stability. Leeks are very, very out-crossing. 

We have older seed, and will have to go back to it. We have not allotted extra space for them this year but we will plainly need to consider it. This year is already a bust for producing seed as leek moths got into our leeks last fall and laid waste to them. They were covered and we did not check them often enough. Oops!

Watermelons are another one that have been very frustrating. We've given up on trying to breed a better yellow-when-ripe watermelon than Golden Midget. While I think we did breed a better one - larger melon, smaller seeds, thinner rind, better texture - the taste continued to be only so-so. However, the project kept throwing green melons with much better flavour. We decided to grow out the ones we had saved of those green ones (usually for exceptionally good taste) and look for a small, early watermelon with the all the qualities we wanted except the golden rind. Because the golden rind gene is recessive, we expect to be filtering that out now for a few years to come.

In mid August we had a night where it got down to 9°C overnight. We were really dismayed to see that most of the melons could not handle this. Within a week, all but a handful had wilted and died down. They were far enough along that most of the melons continued to ripen, but I don't think they were as good as they could have been. We have saved some seeds and will persevere, and of course the ones that didn't wilt and die are heavily represented in our selections for this year.

I don't think we kept seeds from this one but it gives the idea of what we are looking at. I like the ones with a tiger-striped rind better, but I think this one did not meet our flavour requirements. We'll take whatever rinds do that.

None of the beans in this photo are our crosses; I really didn't take any photos of them this year. We grew out most of our bean crosses but I don't have too much to say about them except that we continue to select them for various qualities including flavour, configuration, and disease resistance. No; this picture is about the lettuce, protected by the plastic pop bottles. 

This is the f3, I believe, of our May King - Tom Thumb cross. It is settling into a few distinct phenotypes, any of which we are happy with. There is much more variability in this generation as to whether they stay sweet as they bolt, so that is plainly what we will need to be selecting for over the next few years. I continue to be quite excited about this project though, since I rarely seem to be able to pick a lettuce before it starts to bolt.We ate quite a few of these but there should be some left in the spring to allow to go to seed - providing they stay sweet and tender.

The interspecies squash project (pepo x argyrosperma) is also trundling along. Here are a number of fruits which we ate, or at least tasted, while they were green. You can see there is still a lot of variation and the Reinau Gold zucchini we crossed into it last year was not as prominently visible as I expected. 

I think we want to cross one more round of straight pepo zucchini into these; the flavour is much improved but still on the mild (bland) side. They were all quite eatable though. Goldini was the open pollinated yellow zucchini I was able to get seed for, so that's what we will be adding this year.

Here's what we eventually left to ripen for seeds, minus one long, large, green-striped one which was harvested quite late. The yellow definitely shows up more strongly in the ripe fruit. 

We keep the rest of our zucchini, grown just to eat, covered against vine-borers. These ones were left exposed as we want to select for resistance. Unfortunately, my observation is that the yellow zucchini are more attractive to vine borers than green ones so my desire for a yellow zucchini is at odds with my desire for insect resistance. However, while quite a lot of them eventually succumbed to vine borers, several plants did not (and their offspring have been noted). Since we didn't let them into the other zucchini I have no real comparison, but I do have a vague impression that they lasted better (longer) than other times when zucchini have been afflicted with borers. But it is absolutely something I will have continue to watch carefully.

This warty pattern has been a feature since the first plants grown from the cross. It's not as pervasive as it was, but it still showing up. I rather like it though I don't think it has any particular utility. 

The sibling of this squash, seen in the group photo at mid lower left, turned out to have a vine borer that attempted to get in just below the stem. This is a thing I've only seen happen in this cross. I think it is actually a sign of their resistance to them - when they can't get in at the base of the plant, they try by the fruits. Interestingly, it didn't make it in very far there either.

So that's it for 2024; at least that I have photos for. I'm looking forward to this year with some excitement. Less than a month until we start on indoor seedlings.

I see I didn't post much last year; this year I intend to keep our records of various breeding projects here, and since I intend for us to make some serious progress, let's get started.

Feb 2 2024 - we planted 2 pots Pusa Meghna original seed, 2 pots Pusa Meghna our own saved seed, 3 pots di Jesi, 4 pots Goodman, 3 pots All-the-Year-Round, 3 pots White Snowball, 3 pots Macerata (green), and 2 pots Romanesco (green). This is about 2/3 of intended early spring plants but remaining seeds are still in the mail. 

The hope is that by planting them indoors, very early (I do wonder if this is early enough) we can get good sturdy plants to be planted out mid-March, into still cold and snowy weather (I do wonder if that is early enough, this year) and less light than they were getting inside, and so be induced to believe they have been through the winter and produce some seed once spring actually arrives. We shall see. 

Feb 6 2024 - remaining expected seeds arrived, planted 3 pots Wallaby, 2 pots di Bassano Bonorivo, 2 pots Romanesco Precoce, 3 pots Violetto di Sicilia, and 3 pots Paco's Coloured/Mallorcan cross. All seeds from first batch up by today except Early Snowball and di Jesi. (Some signs of both on Feb 7th.)

Feb 10 2024 - All of first batch up save 2 pots White Snowball; Macerata poor. Reseeded some of both. First of 2nd planting up - 1 di Bassano. (Ferdzy's Fave tomato from first batch also up.) 

Feb 17 2024 - All up save for 1 Wallaby. Fertilized yesterday for the first time. Starting to fear we have definitely started too late. Hoping for a cold spring, sorry everybody.

 

 

I took these photos almost 2 weeks ago and they already look so completely out of date. These zucchini are at least twice as large now, and are starting to look like they will form some buds shortly. They are from the interspecies cross that I have been mentioning off and on for a few years now. In particular, they are from 2 plants grown last year, both of which were probably f2s of the original Lebanese White Bush x Tennessee Sweet Potato squash crossed with another zucchini, in both cases probably Caserta. I thought they were the best of nearly a dozen grown out. I crossed them both with Reinau Gold last year and am looking forward with considerable excitement to see what develops this year. There are 6 batches of 3 seeds from one squash and 9 batches of 3 seeds from the second squash. At least, that's how many were planted. A few did not come up. The plant is, as they develop fruit, to remove the ones that seem the least interesting and see what is left. 

This photo is actually considerably older; we dug up these leeks early in May. In spite of the fact that last year was a pretty bad year for a lot of things, and that I don't consider the leeks to have done very well, they were not that awful. Those second-best ones on the left were actually quite superb, and the middle ones were very decent. The runts on the end were usable. Of course, the very best are still in the garden, going to seed. Speaking of which, few of the ones we dug were bolting and the ones left in the garden did not start to flower at all early, meaning that my hope to be able to leave this strain in the garden over the winter for early spring use seems quite feasible.

Those leeks and these are part of our experiment in growing leeks a different way. After having leek seeds from a mass cross overwinter in the garden, we are now sowing the seeds of their descendants in the fall purposefully. Those scratchy little lines of green are them. They look most unimpressive but I am quite pleased - they have grown a lot since I took this photo and are better than the ones planted in a tray for insurance. (Which to be fair have been somewhat neglected of late.) We expect to dig them up and replant them deeply at the usual time to dig up and replant leeks, without having had to plant them first, so that's good. First year of not planting any leeks started indoors.

Attempting to cross Goldana turnips with Scarlet Ono turnips. Last year did not seem to work. I planted half and half from a few of each left to hopefully cross, and got half and half, no signs of crossing. I am a little more hopeful that they might cross this year since the flowering time seemed to overlap better, but we'll see. Next year, as usual. 

Brassicas behind them kept under cover as much as possible these days due to the vile Swede midge.

Tomatoes in; onions, parsley, leeks, and carrots going to seed in the middle of the bed between them. Again, looking much further along in real life. Mr. Ferdzy is currently attempting to get them strung up, and tearing out his hair over how hard it is to find decent string that will do the job, yet compost in the fall.

 

Here it is, close to the end of the garden season. (Agh, already!) It's time to assess how our breeding projects have worked out this year, both the planned and unplanned ones. To get started, here's our (cucurbita pepo x cucurbita argyrosperma) F2:

 

I thought I had posted about this last year, but I can't find that I did. This was an amazing cross that turned up in the garden last year from some seeds we had saved from Lebanese White Bush zucchini a few years earlier. We knew they would be crossed... we didn't know it would apparently be an interspecies cross with Tennessee Sweet Potato squash! The resulting squash were pretty horrid, frankly, but they were not bitter which has frequently been a problem on the seemingly very rare occasions when these two species (pepo and argyrosperma) cross. Argyrosperma is a squash grown mostly in the southern USA and Mexico, and freqently just for the seeds. We only grew it one year, and weren't too impressed. The flesh is bland, and the squash rapidly get a a very hard shell. If they are like the few of the cross that we tried as zucchini, they also develop their seeds very early. However, they are heat tolerant, drought tolerant, and bug and disease resistant. Getting some of those qualities into summer squash struck us as very desirable, and here we were with the means to work on that.

We planted 4 seeds, of which 3 germinated. One produced squash that appeared to have crossed again with an acorn squash; this was not a happy combination and got pulled pretty promptly. The other two plants appeared very similar, apart from the fact that one of them had a bush habit and the other was a bit more rambunctious, although I wouldn't call it a full-on vine. The fruit the produced was extremely similar, but that's a squash from the vining plant above and below. 

Here it is cut open. We found the stems attaching the fruit to the plant extremely tough, and the skin hardened fairly quickly too. This is no doubt the influence of the argyrosperma. That's a bit dismaying; if the plants are resistant to bugs and disease because they are physically hard that won't make for good eating. Still, these little squash were much better than last year in terms of tastiness and edibility. I won't say they were particularly great, but there is a big improvement.

We saved one fruit from each of the remaining plants. You can see how similar they are. Obviously, we intend to save seeds and continue next year. These are going to be very hard to cut open; they are still hard when ripe like the argyrosperma squash. I did manage it last year so I presume I can do it again.

We planted a bunch of potatoes from seeds in the spring, all of which got munched by flea beetles and leap hoppers, and generally didn't make it apart from a few stragglers that got left in a pot and which we have not examined yet. However, we replanted a number of seed potatoes from seed-grown plants. Here are three of the best four; one of them seems to have disappeared. I need to check the potato boxes to see if I can find a few to plant again next year. It was a dark purple skinned one, with a nice mauve and white interior. 

The others are all offspring of Pink Fir Apple. I wonder about that dark mauve skinned one; it looks like the other parent could be Purple Viking, which is known for producing some real lunkers. But maybe not; who knows what genetics are lurking beneath the surface in potatoes? The one at the top retains a hint of the waxiness of Pink Fir Apple, but the other two are quite light and fluffy in texture. They are all reasonably productive. These are the last remaining few selected from quite a few seed-grown potatoes. We discarded one I was quite interested in. It only grew about 6 or 8 inches high. It also produced about 6 very small potatoes per plant too, and that just wasn't going to cut it, unfortunately. Still! I'm pleased with the ones that remain.

Our watermelon project continues. I appear not to have posted an update last year; bad me! I feel like we've made a lot of progress, but we just aren't there yet. We planted only seeds from yellow-when-ripe watermelon this year, but we got some green skinned ones too. It's just a matter of time to sift them out, since the green skins are dominant, and once there are none, it will mean that gene is out. However, since we can't tell until the fruit ripens, they are still casting out their pollen. It sure slows us down on getting them out. 

Flavour-wise, we were a little disappointed in them this year. In spite of all the heat, they were good, but not great. Very sweet, but we thought a little on the mild side. So, we will have to see what we get next year. Right now they are moderately consistent; most of them are round to slightly oval, with either solid green turning to yellow rinds, or faintly striped green turning to yellow rinds, or "tiger" stripes in two tones of green turning to yellow and yellowish-green. And the ones that don't turn at all, of course.

As for beans, I thought it was kind of an exciting year. Our project of growing out the Blue Lake - Cherokee Trail of Tears for a more anthracnose-resistant Blue Lake type bean continues. Our anthracnose is as bad as ever, I would say, but the Blue Lake seemed especially unresistant this year. They are not really any worse than they have ever been; it's that our crosses that are growing out next to them really are more resistant and it's starting to show! 

I've sorted the crosses into 4 groups: the one I wanted the most was a pink-flowered, white-seeded, round (in cross-section) bean - there was exactly ONE. I have saved the seeds from that plant, up at the top right. Below it are the best from the much more common pink-flowered, black seeded, round bean. The beige seeds produce plants with purple pods; that's been the case since the cross first happened. I'd be more excited about them, because they are productive, tasty, and disease resistant, but for the fact that there are already quite a few purple-podded pole beans out there, and I don't know that mine are any improvement on them. Finally there are a lot of white-flowered, white-seeded plants and I saved seeds from the best of them. The seeds tend to be larger than those of the original Blue Lake, and the pods even more variable from round to really quite flat. There's also a lot of variability on the anthracnose resistance front, so we will be continuing to winnow out the disease-prone ones for a few years, I expect. But over all, they really are looking quite good.

It's some other beans that have me really full of glee, though; two in particular. The two top sets are from a cross that turned up in the garden last year, and dried down to an amazing marbled mauve. It was in a patch that was a cross between Deseronto Potato and Blue Lake; I made the decision to discard that cross because it had turned out to be extremely lack-lustre but I kept the beans from the one plant. I determined that it was most likely ((Deseronto x Blue Lake) x (Anellino Yellow x Cherokee Trail of Tears)) OR ((Deseronto x Blue Lake) x (Blue Lake x Cherokee Trail of Tears)). Yes, I've mis-labelled that seed bag - must fix it.

On the top left are the seeds I'm keeping to try again, from a number of plants. These were the most disease resistant and reasonably productive ones, and they are mostly small and round like navy beans. I did keep one larger, flatter one just because it had such an unusual slate-blue colour. It looks black in the photo but it really is not. The ones in the tub were the rejects, which will be eaten this winter. 

There was one bean in this set that was truly amazing. That's the taupe seeds from it in the bottom right of the photo. All those seeds come from one plant. There would have been even more, except that the deer made a bee-line for it every time they broke into the garden and ate a bunch of it. I've never seen such a large, robust, branching bean plant. It was also quite disease-resistant. It has big, fat purple pods, and the seeds are a reasonably large size in addition to being numerous. Its sole flaw is that it was rather late to dry down, but we'll see how its offspring do - because you can be very sure those seeds are getting planted. 

The final bean in this set was another one that stood out as extremely productive. I wrote about spotting this one in the Octarora beans earlier this summer. The pile of seeds is about half the size of the other primo cross, but they are smaller generally and more dried down at this point. That's still an impressive amount of beans from one plant, and if the offspring are anywhere near as good as this plant was, they may actually replace the entire Blue Lake - Cherokee Trail of Tears project, even though it did so well this year, as being better. Amazing! A dark horse, so to speak. On which note, I'd like to ask how people feel about green beans with black seeds. They have not been admired in modern agriculture particularly, I know that, but they do seem to be what I am getting to some degree.

The final beans are the Lima beans. The photo is a bit of a mess, but the original seed I got for Alabama is in the packet at the top. I was trying to determine how much, if any, they have crossed with other Limas. I think the answer is; they have. Immediately below them are what I believe to be uncrossed Alabamas. They have just not darkened as much as the older ones, but they have the distinctive black eye. The ones immediately to their right, I believe to be a cross between Alabama and Potawatomi, otherwise seen in an un-crossed state in the lower left. These look like Alabama but with a pinker tint and brown to pinkish eye, and one of them had some darker mottling like Potawatomi which was what convinced me that these are a cross. 

Then there are a good number that are very pale when shelled, although they dry to a standard colour, and have no eye, or only a very faint one. I have concluded that these may be a cross between King of the Garden (those green seeds in the middle bottom) and Alabama. We planted a lot of seeds from a single plant of King of the Garden this spring, that last year was the only plant of any variety that did well, which was startling because King of the Garden is usually our latest and least productive Lima bean. It was a terrible year for Lima beans generally. However, we're just not getting very many King of the Garden beans this year, and I have to conclude that it is because it was an F1 hybrid, and the subsequent plants don't resemble it particularly. None of them are that spectacularly productive, nor do they have the green colour. However, if I'm right, I'll be interested to see how they develop next year, especially if we get any back-crosses.

Finally, our selected line of extra-hardy leeks is doing well, apart from the leek moth which now appear to be a fixture. They still look quite variable but we have a good selection of medium to large sized leeks in the bed, so it looks like we are making progress in selecting them to size up a bit earlier. Unfortunately, I left about 8 to 10 leeks from last year to go to seed, and although I haven't cleaned it yet, it looks like there will be next to no seed. Not only is that pushing it on the number of leeks to let go to seed, they did very badly at blooming at overlapping times. However, there's lots of seed left from the year before, and this years, as said, are looking good. Onward to next year...

As you know by now, if you are a regular reader, Mr. Ferdzy and I have all kinds of bees buzzing around in our bonnets. One of them is the idea of growing potatoes from seeds. Actual seeds, from an an actual potato fruit, not seed potatoes. Up above, you see us - okay the bottom half of Mr Ferdzy - about to dig up the little section allotted to this project this year.

We tried a different technique this year for starting our seeds. Normally we have started them in pots inside very early in the winter, let them die down, refrigerated the resulting mini-tubers to simulate winter, then planted them out to grow in the summer. Most potato breeders do this; they figure it cuts out a year of the long process of assessing new potatoes. We have come to the conclusion, however, that we lose too many little mini-tubers in this method.

So, this year we started them indoors in pots, but later in the winter to go out into the ground with everything else in the spring. Most of them died down and formed mini tubers - but not quite so mini as in the more usual technique, but there were 3 in particular that grew, and grew, and grew. Eventually we got fed up with them and decided to dig them anyway.


And there they are, with a brick for scale. We thiiiiink 2 of them are from Duane Falk and the Latvian potato seed he gave us, but we are not certain. One of them is not; it was mauve with a white edge to it. It looked a bit like ham. It tasted very good (but not, alas, anything like ham) when we boiled one of them, so it will be replanted. Unfortunately, of the other 2, one tasted "okay" and one tasted downright bad and so has already been eliminated from replanting. We will plant the "okay" one - it may do for future breeding even if the flavour is a bit blah, if it continues to produce like it did this year. And if it has fertile flowers, of course. Always a question, with potatoes.


Of the remaining, more typical potato-lets, we eliminated a number of these little piles - each pile representing a single plant - on the grounds that we were already not impressed by their productive capacities. Many of them, though, went into a paper lunch bag, again one for each plant. From there they go into the house, and a sacrificial victim is selected and boiled for 15 minutes. We then assess it for flavour and texture. If it gets a thumbs up, it will be planted next spring. If it gets a thumbs down, it goes into the compost.


We got about halfway through testing all the new types of potatoes that are under consideration for replanting in the spring before we started suffering from serious potato fatigue. We'll finish testing them on another day, then see how they survive the winter in the cold room... next year we will plant them out and see how they do.

We were a little surprised to eliminate some of the potatoes we had grown from seed last year. They had all been tested for flavour already, but there were a couple that just didn't impress us the second time around. Different growing conditions? We were in a different mood? Who knows?

One of the potatoes we eliminated made me a bit sad. The potatoes it made were not very large, but it made lots and lots of them, and the foliage only grew about 6" or 8" high! But while it rated quite well for flavour last year, this year we didn't think it tasted good at all. Too bad. 

There is something about very little potatoes; they are slightly bitter compared to even medium sized potatoes from the very same plant. We try to keep that in mind when we are testing these tiny potatoes.  However, there is a limit!

Over all, we are quite pleased and excited with the results of our potato seed trials this year, and we are looking forward to even bigger and better things next year - we hope! 

Time to assess this year in watermelons! As it should surprise no-one to hear, this was an excellent year for watermelons, mostly. It would have been nice to have had what rain we had earlier in the summer while the fruits were forming, rather than later when they were finishing ripening, but whatever. We had a few moments of fear and frustration in the beginning, when many of the seeds failed to germinate. We did a second planting but no further attempts at coaxing them to sprout. Do or die; that's the breeder's motto.

Consequently we got going with fewer plants in the beds than we had planned, but enough to go on with, as it happened. The ones that grew, grew. I'm going to spend less time describing individual watermelons than I have in past seasons, because I think this year has marked a turning point. We are still eliminating at least half the watermelons that we get from next years planting, but we are also seeing a consistency in quality that just didn't used to be there.

You can see the reports for 2015, 2016, and 2017 at the links. It is really encouraging to me to see how much the watermelons have improved over the last 4 years.

I'll start with the Golden Rind project (melons who's rinds turns yellow when they are ready to be picked).


GR02-0815 was the second watermelon we picked, but it would have been ripe at the same time as the first one. At just under a kilo, we would have liked it to be a little larger, but it was a decent size. We scored it a 7 for flavour; a fairly typical score this year and anything that scored lower is not going to make the cut next year. This one is in, though; decent flavour, earliness, adequate size.

This look - oval, with thin stripes, was one of three styles that seemed to predominate in the watermelons which turned yellow when ripe this year.


Here's how it looked when cut. Colour a little pale but okay, a reasonable number of reasonably sized seeds, rind a little thicker than I like but not too thick; again all good enough to go on with.


GR04-0820 shows the second distinctive style we were seeing in this patch. At over 1.5 kilos, it was a much better size than GR02-0815, and only a few days later. In spite of being a little watery (I believe it had just rained the day before we picked it) it scored an 8 for flavour. Most of the others of this type did not score so well. This one is definitely in for planting next year.


Dang! Forgot to photograph this one before we cut it. GR08-0820 was in many ways the best of the Golden Rind project this year. I consider the size (over 2.2 kilos) to be just about perfect, and it scored an 8 for flavour.


The other project, for orange-fleshed melons, also had the same frustrations starting out but went on to produce numerous, good quality melons, with more consistency than we have seen until now. In spite of how much larger these melons are in general, they are only a few days later to ripen.


This melon, PJ01-0818, scored a 7 for flavour - pretty typical, the lowest rating for this project this year was 6, and only one managed to score an 8 - and had a slightly pale colour but was within the acceptable range.

PJ03-0827 had a rather thick rind, but good colour and at 5.588 kilos was the largest of the year. Maybe a bit too large, but eh, I'll take it. It held well in the fridge too.


PJ04-0827 was a bit on the red size but again, acceptable as an orange melon, and scored an 8 for flavour in addition to having a nice thin rind. It could have held a bit better but still, it's in for next year.


PJ09-0904 had a thicker rind than I like, but good flavour (7) and excellent colour. It too is in.

There are still a few melons left to be picked in this batch but they have been considerably more consistent than the Golden Rind project, which in addition to more melons scoring 8, also had melons scoring as low as 2, so I am not expecting anything much different from what we have seen thus far.

Mr Ferdzy is chaffing at being restricted to these 2 watermelon projects, so this one may be dropped next year to give him more scope with other watermelons, but it remains to be decided. If we go ahead and replant them, I think we can hope for continuing progress next year.