Freckles lettuce

Sometimes people give me vegetable seeds, they have different reasons for doing this, I dont always know why they do it but I do know that I really like it.  I particularly like it when I get surprise seeds from some dedicated seed saver.  Unfortunately I can not always grow every seed that I am given (although I certainly try my best) and sometimes I have to wait until the correct season to grow them, but only the best are kept from year to year.  One type of seed that I have recently been given is from an old heirloom variety of lettuce.

Freckles lettuce plants

I have never been overly fond of lettuce as it tends to be fussy and goes bitter at the drop of a hat.  Lettuce also tends to want to die, if there is anything around that eats plants the lettuce somehow calls it over for a munch.  The varieties I have grown in the past have required large amounts of water and weeding to deliver less than inspiring yields.  For these reasons I normally would not grow lettuce, but for some unknown reason I gave this one I go.

This variety is called "Freckles", it is an apple green variety with leaves that are uniquely speckled and splashed with deep red.  The pictures I took do not do it justice, the red is a lot darker in real life and the green more vibrant.  This plant has red blotches on top of the leaf as well as under the leaf.  Interestingly the blotches do not go the whole way through the leaf, the pattern on top of the leaf does not match the pattern under the leaf.

Freckles lettuce is a survivor!

It is mostly used as a loose leaf variety of lettuce.  I believe this variety can be cooked and used as a substitute for spinach but am yet to try that myself.  I like learning the history of the vegetables I grow, this one seems to have an interesting past.  From what I can gather it was originally a Dutch variety which was carried from the Netherlands to Canada by a Mennonite immigrant (named Urias Martin) in 1799.  Prior to that its history seems to have been lost.  I have also been told it was one of the lettuce varieties carried to Australia on the first fleet but unfortunately have not been able to confirm the accuracy of that claim.

I grow this lettuce mostly in the cooler weather, it does not appear to be bothered by frost.  I grew it in a bed where I thought it would have the best chance, unfortunately it is also a bed that had mustard plants flower and drop seed so the lettuce has to grow in amongst countless purple mustard volunteers.  Even with this high level of competition the lettuce performs rather well.

Freckles lettuce (green) amongst many purple mustard volunteers

Being reasonably dry and hot I expected the lettuce to bolt to seed and go bitter, yet it seems to hold on ok and has not yet gone bitter.  Being so dry it is not growing as fast as it probably could, but it is still growing reasonably fast.  I would be interested to grow this using aquaponics and see how it can perform given ideal conditions.

Being a leaf variety rather than a head variety of lettuce means that we cut leaves as we need them and the plants keep on growing.  Any small or weak plants are removed so that only the stronger and better plants will eventually set seed.  Any plant that bolts to seed first is also removed so that slower bolting plants are the result.  Every time you save seeds you are adding selective pressure, I try to be conscious in selecting for traits that I find desirable so I end up with constantly improving stock.

Freckles lettuce growing well despite the dry conditions

What they taste like
One must keep in mind that this is a lettuce, so the taste will not blow your socks off.  I dont believe that any lettuce is truly remarkable as far as taste goes.  In my opinion lettuce is something you have with food, although it is certainly not bad for you it is not a food by itself.  Freckles lettuce tastes ok, it is not bitter or anything like that unless it is really a long way through flowering.  I guess I would describe the taste as pleasant and mild.  I have eaten many different home grown lettuces over the years and I would have to say that this one is my favourite.  I certainly plan to grow this variety every year as long as I have space.

I really should pull out some mustard

Where to get Freckles lettuce seeds
I will eventually try to sell seeds of Freckles lettuce, when I do they will be listed on my for sale page along with various other heirloom vegetables and perennial vegetables that I grow.  If I do not have it listed and you desperately want some seed let me know as I may have a little seed to spare.

Freckles lettuce - I will let the best plants go to seed when it is time

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Babingtons Leek another rare perennial allium in Australia

Babingtons Leek (Allium ampeloprasum var. babingtonii) is an extremely rare perennial leek that is unlike any other leek I have ever seen or heard of.  When this leek flowers it generally does not produce seed, instead it grows tiny leek bulbs on the flower head, kind of like the leek version of tree onions.  This topsetting habit makes it unique among leeks and makes it interesting to grow and draws attention to itself from everyone who sees it.

Babingtons leek is rare in the world, so rare that it is almost extinct.  It is one of the rarest edible leeks that are in Australia.  Very few people grow them and almost no one has heard of them.  

There is little information on the internet about Babingtons leek and much of what I did read seems to contradict each other.  Most of what I have read was either written in the old days, or (like most gardening books) was written by someone who has never grown or even seen a Babingtons leek.  I find that kind of frustrating and would prefer to get information that has been obtained by personal experience or just go and work it out myself.  The person who I got these leeks from had not grown them for long so did not know much about them either.

Babingtons leek flowering - note the bulbils starting to enlarge

It grows wild in Ireland, England and a few other little countries over there and is only semi-domestcated.  Like so many other alliums the origins of this plant have been lost in history.  Perhaps it was deliberately bred by some dedicated people, perhaps it happened on a roadside from spilled seed with just the right combination of genetics, perhaps it happened in the wild away from people completely and was discovered by chance.  Many people theorise that the Babingtons leek is a relic from some ancient monastery, unfortunately we will never know for sure.  What we do know is that it has been around for a long time and there is not much of it anymore.

Babingtons leek, much like any other allium, benefits from moisture and nutrients early in the season, the more the better.  That being said it can perform remarkably well in rocky or sandy soil and with minimal soil moisture, this productivity under harsh conditions is one of the benefits of being a semi-domesticated perennial vegetable.  From what I am told it does not cope with poorly drained soils, my garden does not suffer from this so I do not know about this from observation. 

Just like any other perennial leek, the Babingtons leek tends to be dormant over summer and will die down to odd little bulbs.  I assume that in more mild climates and with more soil moisture that the Babingtons leek could be convinced to grow through summer, but I am yet to try this myself.  I know that the perennial leeks I grow can be kept growing all year if provided with adequate soil moisture.

Babingtons leek, another exceptional perennial vegetable

People in countries where Babingtons leek are more common often eat the bulbils, they say that the bulbils taste like garlic.  They also eat the young flower scape in a similar way to garlic scapes and say that they taste similar.  I have never tried either of them and doubt I will get a chance any time soon as I am trying to increase the numbers of this rare plant.


What does Babingtons leek taste like
I love the taste of leek, it is a very underrated vegetable in my opinion.  Babingtons leek tastes much like every other leek.  I have eaten a few varieties of leek over the past few years and to be honest can not tell the difference between them.  I have read that Babingtons leek may be more fibrous but from my limited experience this is not the case.  Over summer it will die down to bulbs, I am told that these bulbs taste much like garlic.  I have not tried them yet as I am trying to increase my stock but it does stand to reason as Giant Russian Garlic is another variety of perennial leek.

Babingtons leek is extremely rare, in Australia it is almost unheard of.  For this reason, if you grow them, please do not kill the plants when you harvest the leeks.  Like every other variety of leek, you can harvest by cutting them off and leaving the roots in the soil to regrow.  Another method is to pull up the plant, cut off the roots with a few mm of shank attacked and put this in a jar with a tiny amount of water to sprout.  They only need a tiny amount of water, just touching the roots is enough, too much water will cause the whole thing to rot.  After this has sprouted it can be replanted into the garden to grow.  In this way you can have your leek and eat it too.

Babingtons leek starting to flower, the bulbils will grow and the flowers will fall off as it grows

 How to reproduce Babingtons leek

Your stock of Babingtons leek can be increased in a few ways.  By not killing the plants when you harvest them stops you from losing plants but does not stop you from eating them.  This does not increase the number of plants you have and usually prevents the plant from flowering that year, but it does stop you from having any less which is a good first step with something as rare as these.

The plant will die down to a bulb each summer, many times this bulb will divide in a similar way to garlic (but into less cloves) and can be dug up, split apart and replanted.  This is a slow and steady way to increase your stock.  Quite often this will result in a few extra large plants, most of which will flower the following season.

The larger plants will send up a flower stalk each year.  This flower stalk will produce some flowers as well as some bulbils.  Please do not remove the flower stalk, it is kind of the whole point behind growing Babingtons leek.  While removing the flower head may result in larger underground bulb or a larger leek plant you could simply grow regular perennial leeks if this is what you are after.  When it is ready the bulbils may fall off the plant and start to grow all by themselves, but a better way is to remove them and plant them somewhere safe.  Every bulbil should sprout and grow for you, if left to their own devices anything could happen and the bulbils may be lost. 

It may take 2 or 3 years for these bulbils to send up flower stalks of their own, or if you treat them well they may flower in their first year, but once you have a flowering sized Babingtons leek plant it will provide you with many bulbils each year.  I am lead to believe that each year the number of bulbils increases significantly.  It would not be difficult to have a small patch of Babingtons leek where one plant is left to produce bulbils each year and the rest are harvested and eaten.

It may be possible to obtain some seed from Babingtons leek, in order to do this you would probably have to remove most/all of the bulbils so that the plant can put energy into the seeds rather than the bulbils.  I have not yet done this as I wanted the bulbils, but when I do I will grow the seeds and if anything remarkable comes of them I will try to distribute them.  I assume that seed grown plants will display a lot of variation, some will invariably be less exciting than the parent stock, but there is a chance that something remarkable may come out as well.  We need people to breed these things and enrich our country with them.


Where to buy Babingtons leek in Australia

I sell Babingtons leek bulbils and small plants on my for sale page as soon as they are ready.  Before you buy them please read about how to grow Babingtons leek.  I have a range of other perennial vegetables, some herbs, some heirloom vegetable seeds, and a few other things listed on that page too.  Unfortunately I can not rush the Babingtons leek, when they are ready they are ready and when I sell out then I have to wait until the following summer for more to grow.  Bulbils should be ready in Summer but they will not start to grow until Autumn/Winter.

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True potato onion seeds and other perennial alliums

True Potato Onion Seed

In 2013 some of my potato onions flowered.  It is the first time I have ever seen a potato onion flower so I was very excited, I wrote a little about it on a blog post called Potato onion seeds.  I planted about half of those seeds in Autumn and nothing germinated, I was more than a little disappointed but there was nothing I could do.

I planted the rest of the seeds in Spring and some of them have just begun to germinate.  I dont know how many will grow but at this stage it looks like only a small number.  I could not be more excited about this.  To make things even better, some of my original potato onions have begun to flower again this year!  This should hopefully give me some more seed to try and grow next year.  Hopefully they will flower more often so I can have seed grown potato onions to begin selecting for traits I want to see in them.

Tiny Potato Onion seedlings germinating

Once these seedlings grow a bit I will separate them and see what they turn into.  Apparently potato onions that are grown from seed exhibit a lot of variation.  I had many types of onion flower at the same time as these potato onions (potato onions, spring onions, everlasting onion, tree onions, several types of bulb onions) so whatever these seeds grow into each of them should be different from each other.  Fingers crossed something truly remarkable comes out of this lot.

Potato onion seedlings growing larger

Potato Onions flowering again

Potato onion seedlings - only the strong survived

Everlasting Onion Seed and Bulbils

Another perennial onion I grow are the amazing Everlasting onions.  They flower each year but never produce seeds.  They have been grown by many different people in many different climates for well over 30 years and have not set seed and do not produce top sets.  They rapidly split in half many times throughout the year so are simple to multiply without the need for seeds.

Everlasting onions flowering happily as usual

Last year one everlasting flower produced a bulbil, I planted this in a small 10cm pot and kind of forgot about it.  That one bulbil has split into 7 small plants over the year and they are now flowering.  That is pretty remarkable considering how little space is in that small pot.  Time will tell if this will be more inclined to produce topsets or if it was just a once off.  Topsets are fun so I would like this to happen more often.  If not the tree onions are flowering at the moment and they produce a lot of topsets.

Everlasting onions grown from one bulbil - starting to flower

Last year from several hundred flower heads my everlasting onions actually produced some viable seeds.  I planted most of the seeds and ended up with 7 seedlings.  So far I can not see a lot of variation between the seedlings which I find rather odd.  Some are slightly larger than others, some are slightly brown whereas others are slightly red, but this happens throughout the year with regular everlasting onions so is nothing different.  They are still very small so perhaps I will notice differences as they grow, or perhaps they will be very similar to the parent, only time will tell.  As mentioned above a lot of alliums were flowering at the same time so I would have expected them to cross a little and result in some unique perennial onions.

Everlasting onion seedlings, I have since planted them into separate pots

Babingtons Leek (Allium ampeloprasum var. babingtonii)

One of the perennial leeks I grow is Babingtons leek, I should write a blog post about them but probably wont for a while.  I am not aware of anyhere in Australia that currently sells Babingtons leek so if I ever have enough I plan to sell them so that more people can grow and experience these amazing plants.  They are a kind of wild leek that has been semi-domesticated, when it flowers it grows tiny bulbils on the flower head instead of flowers, kind of like the leek version of tree onions.

I heard of Babingtons leek years ago and tried to track down some to grow.  One place had them for sale for more than I was willing to pay, but I contacted them anyway and they had sold out.  That place stopped selling plants altogether shortly after.  I emailed them and asked if I could get in touch with their supplier and was told no.  They believed that this variety of leek had died out in Australia completely and they wished me luck in finding any.

Babingtons leek

As luck would have it some kind person traded some of my things for a few tiny Babingtons leek plants.  I planted them in 3 different places to help protect against disaster.  They grew slowly for me, then died down over the heat of summer.  I hoped they had died down to bulbs but was not overly confident that they were coming back as they were posted at an inconvenient time for them.

When the weather cooled and the plants began to grow I had increased my stock from 5 tiny plants to 6 plants which ranged in size from tiny to reasonably large.  I had hoped that more would have grown from the roots, but that was not to be this year.  I am told that they will divide a bit each time they die down and many people increase their numbers in this way.  I am assuming that mine did not increase in number much as they were posted late in their season so they put their energy into establishing rather than dividing.

This year one of the plants is beginning to send up a flower stalk.  I have told the kids not to go near this plant and am concerned that they may remove it or damage it and I will have to wait another year to see what happens next.  Regardless, I have at least one plant of flowering size and it should flower each year from here on.  I am guessing that if all goes well the other plants will be flowering size next year as each of them is now larger than the ones I started with.

Not a great picture of Babingtons leek starting to flower

I do not know how many bulbils to expect from one flower stalk.  I know of no one here who has grown these and have to rely on the internet for information.  Some internet sites say three of four large bulbils will be produced, others say a few dozen, while others say several hundred tiny bulbils.  I have no option but to wait and see.  I find all of this to be very exciting.  Judging by the size of the flower I am guessing not many bulbils will be produced this year, next year the plant may be larger and produce more.


Chives (Allium schoenoprasum)

I dont have a lot to say about these little guys.  They are nothing special, they are not even a special type of chives, but I like them.  They die down to tiny bulbs each winter and grow again when the weather warms up a little.  Apparently they are the smallest species of edible onions.  I would like more of them so am letting some of them flower in the hope of either collecting the seeds or just letting the seeds fall and grow by themselves.

Chives starting to flower

Spring onions (Allium fistulosum)

Spring onions are, in my opinion, the poor cousin of the everlasting onion.  They are edible, useful, hardy and perennial so are not without their charm.  I had some plants at our previous house that were 3 or so years old.  Prior to moving here I saved their seed to bring with us.  I planted them during the first few weeks after we moved in and they have been growing ever since.  I do not have the heart to kill them as they are perennial and require very little looking after, so they have stayed where they are not doing too much.  They produce viable seed each year, I used to collect the seed but recently have not bothered as everlasting onions are far superior.

Spring onions are perennial onions, we used to eat their leaves and white shanks.  The problem is that their leaves get too thick and coarse after their first year and I do not know how to fix that other than planting new seed each year and killing the parent stock.  I have cut some to the ground, when they sprout they are think again.

Everlasting onions have far thinner foliage and it is never course.  Spring onions do not have the ability to produce bulbs whereas everlasting onions die to bulbs each year if I want them to and will keep growing if I water them a lot over summer.

Tree onions are an interspecific hybrid between spring onions and bulb onions that was made accidentally hundreds of years ago.  I have often thought of trying to recreate tree onions with better parents but I doubt I will ever try to do that as I have a lot of other, more deserving things going on in the vegetable garden.

Spring Onions flowering - these are almost 4 years old now

Giant Russian Garlic (Allium ampeloprasum var. ampeloprasum)

This is great stuff.  Botanically it is a type of perennial leek, but for everyone else it is a massive garlic that is mild in taste.  Apparently this can grow in more tropical places where regular garlic can not.

Many people say that they can not produce seed but this is not true, each year mine produce a tiny amount of seed which grows into new plants.  The seed seems to grow true to type even when there are other types of leek flowering at the same time.

Russian Garlic almost ready to flower and die down

At the moment my plants are looking shabby as they are almost ready to flower, after they have done so they will die down to bulbs.  This normally happens around Christmas/New Year.  I will dig them up after this and have them for sale again, digging them up now does not go so well for them.

Some people complain that Giant Russian garlic is too mild.  I have found that if I plant them early and they grow through some frost the taste is a lot more intense.  Apparently putting them in the fridge a few weeks prior to planting can have the same result if they are grown in frost free areas.

I have successfully (and accidentally) stored the bulbs for over 18 months before we moved here.  I stored the cloves somewhere and forgot about them, by the time I noticed them it was too late to plant and I had no more garden space so I waited for the following year.  From those, 100% grew and the plants were indistinguishable from the fresh ones.  While this is far from ideal, it shows how easy these things are to grow.

One single giant Russian garlic clove, they do get a lot larger than this in good years

Perennial vegetables for sale in Australia

If you are interested in growing some of these I do sell everlasting onions, tree onions, perennial leeks, giant Russian garlic, garlic chives, two types of potato onions and a bunch of other perennial vegetables (and some heirloom vegetable seed) on my for sale page.  When I have enough I plan to also offer Babingtons leeks but that will have to wait for at least a few months to see what happens with this flower.  If the potato onion seedlings or the everlasting onion seedlings end up as anything remarkable I will sell them too, but I dare say that is a while off as I would like to grow them out for a few seasons to see how they perform and evaluate if they are worth keeping.

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