Kitchen Garden Forum

I am looking for interesting sweet medium and hot peppers. Also looking for East Asian Aubergines or Heirloom Tomatoes for taste and unusual carrots. This is what I have to swap, all organically grown and self saved seeds, harvested 2007 unless stated.

Basil Genovese the large green leaved one
Garlic Chives(chinese chives). The delicious garlic flavoured leaves, buds and flowers are all edible.
Mizuna Highly productive oriental leafy brassica.
Parsley, Italian Flat Leaf
Paprika Pepper (Medium Red) Barcelona Pepper
Large fleshy paprika peppers with a hint of heat. Found these in a market in Barcelona.
Pepper (Hot Red) Cayenne Dries well, excellent cropper and makes a great powder
Pepper (Hot Yellow) Lemon Drop Small crinkly lemon yellow chilli peppers with very hot citrus flavour
Pepper (Hot Red) Thai Red Seeds saved from Thai grocery peppers, dry well, hot.
Tetragon / New Zealand Spinach spreading succulent, withstands heat and drought well, use like spinach in summer. (small number left)

hello nemo here.i have russian black tomatoes both round and plum seeds i saved my self

I've been growing Noir de Crimee would that be the same as Russian Black? Would you recommend the ones you have for taste. I am after the best tasting tomatoes I can find.

Hi Cevenol and Nemo (My cockatiel is called Nemo!), I have a lovely chilli pepper called Rotoco which is quite fleshy and a medium heat. It has black seeds and purple flowers and is very productive. They are own saved seeds from last year if you would like to try them.

I also have about 40 different varieties of tomato seeds. The very best flavoured cooking tomato is Cornu des Andes. I tried quite a few new ones last year including Black Crim which is the same as yours. I thought the flavour improved when we got some warmer weather as the summer was dull and wet until about September. It was a very good tomato though.

Sun Gold is a nice sweet orange cherry type. A lovely very productive one for growing in pots which also tastes good is Garden Pearl. Cherokee Green has a lovely flavour but not very many fruits and another I liked from the new ones was Eva's Purple Ball which had quite large round fruits with a good flavour and nice solid flesh.

Abraham Lincoln doesn't have a lot of fruit but always tastes wonderful.

I've plenty of seeds of most of them.

Hi plumpudding
Is the pepper you mention a Rocoto see wiki id
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocoto
I would like to try it, could you tell me a bit more; what colour, did it have a name where did it come from. I've got one that is yellow-orange and mild and was looking for some others, for my perennial peppers experiment this year.
I like the sound of all the tomatoes a few (say 10 seeds) of each except black krim, would be absolutely fantastic - have you seen my list of seeds I've got to swap you can also go to my website and see my full Seed List for 2008 you can have seeds from anything on there (I haven't saved all those but it states where the seeds came from.)

Re Tomatoes I also have seeds for:

Tomato, Double Rich (K) Delicious large fruit with firm flesh, high levels of vitamin C.
Tomato, Red Pear (SS) Small sweet pear shaped fruit.
Tomato, Rutger’s - Round red vine tomatoes, bred by Rutgers university for Campbell's soup in 1934. Chosen by NASA for the Seeds in Space programme which is good enough reason to try it.
Tomato, Porter - Texan variety of small, thin skinned, pink-red plum tomatoes. Good for bottling and ok eating. Resistant to drought, cracking and sunburn, ideal for the hottest of climates!
Tomato, Purple Calabash - Heirloom deep purple-burgundy flattened and puckered fruit. This did not grow well for me as it needs a cooler climate.

That sounds like my Rotoco plant, but the picture of the fruits is not quite the same, my plants have more oval fruits, up to 2 inches long. The plants over-winter nicely in the conservatory and then fruit very early. As I've said they send out really long shoots if you let them do their own thing, and I'm waiting to see if I've done them any serious harm by cutting them back severely. I got the original seeds from Real Seeds.

I'll let you have the seeds you mentioned. I notice your Purple Calabash didn't do very well. I got a few off, but wasn't very impressed with them, they look horrible, have thick skin and don't taste good enough to bother with them again.

It would be nice if you could let me have a few seeds of the tomato Double rich and the Snake beans if you can spare them. Five or six beans would be enough just to try them.

I'll have to look up the rules about seed swapping to see what to do next.

By the way, your place looks wonderful on the web site. I'll be interested to read more about the weather and growing conditions.

Pat

The snake beans did very well here but a lot of growers on the forum did not have much luck with them in the UK, so just a word of warning. I grew them in a polytunnel as climbers don't do so well here; too dry and windy in summer. I've got loads of seeds and you are more than welcome more to try.
The Purple Calabash did very poorly for me too I was hoping to give them another try this year but i don't hold out much hope. Double Rich are worth growing, i think good eaters and good sauces.
I don't want to take too many seeds from you if there is nothing else i can give you in exchange so you can drop the Garden Pearl, Eva's Purple Ball and Abraham Lincoln.
I have a nice purple podded climbing French bean called Cosse Violette, slightly flattened pods great taste.
Just pm our adresses and send the seeds
i'll pm you now

I've got some pepper seeds from the garden of my inlaws in Romania. Not sure what variety it is, but it looks similar to Aci Sivri. Long red and no more than 2 cms thick. Truely no idea what variety it is though.

We've planted them three weeks ago in the greenhouse and they're now about 3cms tall. I've got more seeds left if anybody is interested.

I'd like to trade for heirloom varieties of tomato or carrots, but other interesting vegetables are of course welcome.

cheers,

Vincent

PLUMPUDDING wrote:Sun Gold is a nice sweet orange cherry type.

Hi PP, have you tried re-sowing Sungold from your saved seeds?

I love the taste of this tomato, but the seed's I've bought from suppliers are always F1's (and relatively expensive: £2-3 for 5-10 seeds). I always assumed that an F1 wouldn't come out the same in the next generation; what's your experience been?

Hi Vincent
Would love to try the 'aci sivri' or whatever they are. Would you like to swap for Tomato Noir de Crimee - its a black tomato and so far the best tasting tomato I've grown.
I'll PM you

Colin, Yes, I grew on some seed saved from Sungold and got some very sweet tasting red cherry tomatoes. Not noticeably different from Sungold apart from the colour, so very good.

PLUMPUDDING wrote:I grew on some seed saved from Sungold and got some very sweet tasting red cherry tomatoes

That's interesting.

Can anyone else give some general guidance on the results of re-sowing seed from F1 varieties or other veg? I'd always assumed you'd just get a poor imitation of the original - sounds like that's not always the case.

Hi Colin,
I've saved seed from F1 courgette goldrush a few years ago. Gave some of the seeds to a few of my friends and sowed some myself. We all got . . . goldrush courgettes, except one of mine was a double (lengthwise, like it had a twin attached down one side). Otherwise, couldn't tell the difference.

Have a look at Rebsie's blog - she's an amateur plant breeder and gives great instructions for breeding your own plants. Lots of other good info including stuff on commercial F1 seed and growing from it.
http://daughterofthesoil.blogspot.com/

Thanks C.J. I've not tried deliberately crossing things, but I do keep a look out for sports or anything that looks a bit different. This year I've potted up one of the Broad Ripple Yellow Currant tomatoes which was much stronger and had lighter coloured leaves than the rest. It did cross my mind that a stray seed might have got into the packet as they were from the Heritage Seed Library.

Last year some of the Mangetout peas, also from HSL grew variegated leaves. So I saved the seeds from a couple of pods from these and from the 10 that germinated two are also variegated, so these are getting special attention this year. They look really pretty with cream splashed leaves and quite large purple and pink flowers, but aren't quite as vigorous as the plain green ones, probably because they have less chlorophyl.