1. People eat this plant, either immediately or after some careful processing

2. People use this plant medicinally

3. People feed this plant to their animals, and then eat the animals

I guess I inhabit the third route more comfortably than your average person. My reasoning, I guess, is this:

If plants are good enough to feed pigs then why is it not good enough for us?

Perhaps this is motivated reasoning. Perhaps I am just too lazy to farm traditional vegetables.

People have called plants in the third route various terms such as fodder (and when fermented, silage) and provender.

Chances are, whatever region you are reading this from, there’s some kind of “<animal>weed” equivalent. And of course, the clue is in the name, not good enough for humans, only good enough for animals.

In my garden a plant showed up called “white goosefoot”, or more broadly, “pigweed”. It grows quietly, wherever it can. It is deemed only good enough for poultry or pigs. What I came to see though, is an incredible survivor: seeds that survive decades in soil, incredible ability to adjust its form according to its environment, huge seed bearing ability.

Plants like white goosefoot are wrapped in fancy Latin names like Chenopodium album. Though luckily, these taxonomists have chosen to honour the common name with a transliteration.

Even Silverweed, my favourite wild rootcrop, was historically seen as animal fodder - you can see that from its Latin epithet, anserina, “of the goose”.

Regular readers of this Substack need no introduction, I’m a huge fan of Silverweed: self propagating, zero care, incredibly nutritious starchy roots.

Going forward, I will keep an extra focus on vernacular names. I’ll use these names to nurture a growing appreciation of the cultures they reflect, tiny pin pricks into the times past and also great guides to hardy and selfless plants.

I’ll remind myself that very occasionally, humanity has collectively reached down and brought a few of these “fodder-level” plants onto a pedestal, but many are left behind, humbly working away and waiting to be appreciated.

Good enough for the animals, good enough for me.

What common “weeds” in your region have some kind of animal term in their vernacular name? Have you eaten any of them?

“Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.”

So what happens if childbirth was earned and not a right? This is the idea behind “The Coast Road” - a collection of short stories and novels written by Carrie Vaughn.

In this fictional world, conspiring black swan disasters (hurricanes, pandemics) repeatedly ravage the fragile modern world until it kicks the bucket. The idea is that the world can survive a single black swan disaster, but when you kick an opponent in the head and stamp on their feet, after you punched them in the groin, they’re probably not getting up again.

After a turbulent Max Max period, surviving humans cohere into an agrarian society, a stable series of settlements along a Californian coastline.

Their medical experts are equivalent to a hands-on mid-level practitioner. These people have managed to preserve basic modern medicine like antiseptics, but most importantly, birth control.

In the Coast Road, households earn the right to childbirth. Households usually have at least one couple capable of bearing children. When they think their collective efforts have been sufficient (consistently high levels of wheat harvest, cloth dyed and so on) they must petition for a banner. If a banner is granted, the household can then elect a woman to have their contraceptive device removed and hope she is fertile.

Perhaps you are now wondering how this kind of coercion is enforced, but in this world, society is highly conditioned against the excesses of their forebears and there is high societal pressure to conform. If your neighbouring household notices one of the women in your household has stopped appearing in the public, or the local council sees a steady dip in your output, they’ll send an Enforcer to check you out.

Enforcers travel in pairs, one as the muscle and the other as the brains. In truth, they work like any other law enforcement agency - they ask enough questions and people squirm. If the social contract - bearing a child without earning a banner - is broken, a household could be broken up. Though it is important to note that they will also get you for hoarding your produce. You could be shunned, where society literally cuts you out and won’t interact or bargain with you. This is the ultimate expression of being excluded at the childhood playground.

Enforcers in the Coast Road are really the embodiment of the societal pressure to conform to anti-capitalist sentiments. Imagine if a policeman showed up at your front door to investigate whether you’re hoarding tinned goods or throwing out repairable socks.

All told, an inhabitant of the Coast Road could be summarised as a secular version of existing modern day religious agrarian communities. For these real life communities, in broad strokes, the self-righting mechanisms are the religion and the culture that has grown around it. A Coast Road inhabitant is bound tightly by a deeply seated aversion of capitalistic over-consumption - though if that isn’t enough, the Enforcers will come after you with the implied threat of a staff and the real threat of societal shunning.

I’ve been thinking about the right to childbirth a long time before I read anything in the Coast Road set of stories. Being a parent is one of the hardest things a person can do, yet it is the easiest thing to initiate. You can tell that modern society struggles with this duality too by perusing, for example, British bureaucracy on child adoption.

I’m not saying childbirth should be earned, but perhaps we should view it a privilege instead.

On the close, I’ll leave you with article 7 of the Convention on the Rights of the Child which declares (emphasis mine):

“The child shall be registered immediately after birth and shall have the right from birth to a name, the right to acquire a nationality and. as far as possible, the right to know and be cared for by his or her parents.”

I didn’t know this until I was researching for this article, but most nations in this day and age take a violation of article 7 as a legal violation, and you guessed it, will send their version of the Enforcers.

Final Thoughts

If it wasn’t clear, I really enjoyed Carrie Vaughn’s “The Coast Road” collection. Please support the author, have a look at her website, read her stories (following the hyperlinks in the ISFB entry is an effective way to do this), support her with your wallet by buying from a local bookstore.

This is an unsolicited discussion of “The Coast Road” collection.

Until next time.

Have you ever been to IKEA? I go there fairly frequently for bits and pieces, a dining table, a bookshelf, a chair, the list goes on. I’m not talking about that today. Yes, I understand they sell adequate furniture at adequate price point by offloading assembly to the consumer (some even find the assembly fun).

What interests me is the restaurant. I’m not talking about the famous meatballs in that famous lingonberry sauce and gravy.

I am interested in the communal restaurant format. I’m interested in selling decent food at cost or even as loss-leaders. I’m interested in these things because I believe that humans have the basic right to a few things: housing, nutritious food, community (amongst others).

I believe that communal kitchens help with these goals, and whilst IKEA restaurants has been prodding my brain with this idea, I’ve had the same feelings when visiting university student cafeterias or when I was reading Ursula Le Guin’s beautiful novel (“The Dispossessed”).

Communal kitchens help with affordable housing because you can build cheaper housing if you don’t have to duplicate a full-fledged kitchen in every house. This has a ripple effect:

1. An extra room in each house due to reduced kitchen size

2. Houses would naturally be organised into walkable neighbourhoods, because how else would people get their meals?

3. The cognitive and time burden of preparing a meal, including tidy-up, is shifted to another entity

4. Meals are naturally cheaper than privately prepped versions because the communal kitchens can buy in bulk.

5. Meals could be provided at cost, or as a loss leader (taking a loss). Only in this case, we’re not trying to push furniture at people but quality of life.

6. Meals could even be free. If people are entitled to free breakfast, lunch and dinner, can you imagine how much that would ease the burden of the average person?

7. People would naturally connect: because isolated kitchens and isolated houses leads to isolated lives. People would share tables, bump into each other, and you know, be social.

I think about these things every time I enter an IKEA restaurant. I wish that there was a communal kitchen five minutes walk from my house, with all the benefits I expounded above, where I could get a decent nutritious meal with my family.

IKEA is a product of capitalism, it wants to sell you stuff to make a profit. Permaculture has good ethics, but IKEA understands the human condition in a very animalistic way: it wants you in the store as long as possible. It knows that you’ll get hungry and it knows that if it offers you delicious food at a low price you’ll have adequate blood sugar and be more magnanimous with your purchases. Look at their loyalty scheme: IKEA Family.

I’m not saying we should lean into capitalism even more, I’m saying that we can learn lessons from these companies because they have been necessarily sharpened by market forces (unless they cheat, of course).

Permaculture is way more than food but there’s a reason why the arguments are strongest and more vital over the dinner table.

Everyone needs to eat, so why not eat together?

I thought it was a mutant Common Yarrow (Achillea millefolium, and I guess I should be proud that I’ve spent enough time with Yarrow to pin down the genus).

This little thing, however, is commonly called Sneezewort. What a wonderful name. Even the Latin name, Achillea ptarmica, means “causes sneezing”.

Something about the common caught in my mind like a splinter, and later that day I discovered that Sneezewort leaves, when chewed, cause a numbing and tingling sensation just like that famous Sichuan pepper.

There’s a famous traditional Chinese Sichuan dish called Mapo Tofu (麻婆豆腐), which is described

using seven specific Chinese adjectives: má 麻 (numbing), là 辣 (spicy hot), tàng 烫 (hot temperature), xiān 鲜 (fresh), nèn 嫩 (tender and soft), xiāng 香 (aromatic), and sū 酥 (flaky)

In this dish, that “numbing” sensation is derived from the Sichuan peppercorn.

Could this really be? Is the Sneezewort an overlooked “western” Sichuan pepper analog?

I have since learned that Achillea ptarmica and plants in the Zanthoxylum family both evolved to use fatty acid amides as a chemical defense against insects and herbivores. Sneezewort uses two amides called Pellitorine and Homospilanthol, whilst the Zanthoxylum family uses Hydroxy-α-sanshool.

On insects, these compounds act like neurotoxin.

For humans, a delicious spice.

What’s wild to me is the convergent evolution. These two plants aren’t even in the same super-clade. You have to go back more than a hundred million years to find their common ancestor (some eudicot). Yet, they both independently evolved the same defense mechanism.

I’m waiting for the Sneezewort to set seed so I can grow one in my garden somewhere. And, of course, I had to get hold of a Zanthoxylum, in this case, Zanthoxylum giraldii to plant in an airpot.

I can then put these two plants side by side and marvel at convergent evolution.

Have you noticed any shared properties between the plants you grow?

The Sharkfin melons, second generation in this garden now, went in a variety of conditions in my forest garden: shady north facing ornamental bed, underneath the apple tree, a sun trapping south facing patch. It turns out (and I should have guessed) that these Tsubaki struggle even in a UK heatwave. The leaves shrivel up in protest at noon but are right as rain come the evening. The others are just fine - apart from one that got obliterated by slugs - and are putting out green growth.

I was also gifted some seeds that are a F2 cross between Cucumis melo var. cantalupensis and Cucumis melo var. cantalupensis - so I’m looking forward to the genetic lottery coming through in this generation. These are hiding out in my coldframe right now but I will find a space outside for some to test the limits of their hybrid vigour.

Further afield, my favourite Apiaceae, Myrrhis odorata, has also set seed in the local park. It’s embarrassingly easy to harvest these anise tasting seeds by the handful. I’ve also got my eye on some common vetch seed, Vicia sativa, that is growing out of the side of the local school. I’ve read that the leaves are good for eating.

One of my favourite perennial leafy vegetables - Rumex obtusifolius - is throwing out seeds in profusion too. I hope these continue to self-seed in my little garden. They give so much and never ask for anything back.

Inside my house, I decided to grow some chilis. I grabbed a random pack from my local discount supermarket and the seed germinated literally overnight using my time-tested “wet paper towel” method. This little thing has now thrown up its first adult leaves. I also ordered some allegedly “heatless” chilis but so far had zero germination. I look forward to harvesting some chilis for christmas - nothing like that festive heat.

Nature produces seeds by the bucket load. Annuals spend themselves for their offspring, perennials patiently send their young out year after year. To me, seeds are hope. They remind me that nature is continually renewing itself.

What are you growing from seed this year?

Whilst I appreciate the unambiguous science of Latin binomials, vernacular names are not only beautiful but give us an insight into the cultural heritage these plants have in different regions.

I frequently refer to Cucurbita ficifolia as Sharkfin melon. I do this because it is a striking, unforgettable term. It’s a term that hints at the inhumane practice that it sometimes replaces.

Camelia japonica, as I have come to discover, is sometimes called the Rose of Winter in Britain because it blooms in late winter (to my surprise).

Sharkfin melons are also called Chilacayote, a name descended from the Aztec “tzilacayotli”, which loosely translates to “smooth squash”.

Rose of Winter is also called Tsubaki in Japanese kanji (椿) which loosely translates to “Tree of Spring”. The left most character means tree (木) and the right most character means spring (春). Kanji seems to be quite beautiful with that kind of minimalism.

In the “western world”, Chilacayote is sometimes called the Fig-leaved Gourd. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the fig leaves in the Garden of Eden, but it would be funny to me if the first peoples in the story used Cucurbita ficifolia leaves to cover themselves.

I am growing Sharkfin melons in my cold frame right now. I originally tried wet paper towel method with fresh seed but I think that was a mistake as the cotyledon were damaged on showing (I guess from mould or fungal attack). I mistook this for some kind of mutation but after drying out the next and last batch, I got really fast and one hundred percent germination in soil after a twenty-four hour soak.

The cotyledons (seed leaves) are absolutely gigantic on Chilacayote. I have no idea what origami tricks nature has contrived to fit them in to one centimetre sized shells. You can see the distinctive Fig-leaves peaking out on the first true leaves. I will need to plant these soon, after this heatwave.

I also rescued a Rose of Winter from underneath my daughter’s trampoline a while ago. The parent is at least ten years old and I would bet many Chilacayote seeds that it was purchased from a garden centre.

I love the feeling of nurturing a seed from a cultivar, like unlocking the chains, rolling the dice of new life on a stifled clone.

This 椿 is quite different from the parent already. The leaves are spikier which in apples at least suggests a reversion to the wild genotype. I think they’re pretty tolerant of neglect - which is good news it seems to be my gardening watchword - though I should probably dig out a bigger plant pot for it in the autumn.

What have you been growing from seed this year?

Do you have any favourite vernacular plant names that stick in your head?

Do you have any favourite plants you grow from seed even though they’re easily purchased?

I set the fruit aside in my kitchen until about six weeks ago. I decided to stir fry it for lunch. When I opened it up, a familiar but subtle scent wafted into my nostrils. Watermelon. Yeah, that’s right. I couldn’t believe it, so I ate a chunk, raw, and yeah, a subtle but unmistakable watermelon taste.

I’m probably hallucinating. What are the chances that I stumble into a sweet mutation a year after writing a substack article about such a thing?

Just to check your expectations, the sharkfin-watermelon graft in that article never went anywhere, this is just from a normal seed.

I’ve opened Sharkfin melon before, and I never encountered this smell. Or perhaps I did and I’m still stuck in a waking dream.

The proof I suppose is in the children, so I’m trying to grow out the seed. I did the classic “wet paper towel” method on half of the fresh seed but this failed miserably for reasons I don’t understand. I dried out the other half, soaked it in water for a day and planted it straight out with crossed-fingers. These germinated, though I’m sure the UK heatwave bumped things along.

I have eight more chances now to see if I hallucinated a sweet sharkfin melon into being.

Cross your appendages.

I’m no lepidopterist. iNaturalist tells me we might have a Flounced Rustic (Luperina testacea), Meadow Brown (Maniola jurtina), Large Skipper (Ochlodes sylvanus), Cinnabar moth (Tyria jacobaeae) and Yarrow Plume Moth (Gillmeria pallidactyla).

The Yarrow Plume Moth in particular looks wild to me, I’ve never seen a moth like it.

In other news, I was recently gifted an airpot and I’m trying to decide what plant gets to have it as a home. Airpots use air-pruning to keep roots from girdling. When roots encounter air, they prune (die) off, and the special channels guide the roots into a healthy root pattern rather than a dense spaghetti ball.

I was looking at nut trees, particularly chestnuts, but found out that most were not self-fertile.

I used to have Sorbopyrus titan in one, but it died of fireblight (I think). Right now, I have a White Mulberry and a Monkey Puzzle Tree in airpots. This will be my third large one and I’m super excited.

If I ever move to a larger plot of land, these airpots will mean I can transplant these trees with a high degree of success.

I’m open to suggestions so don’t be shy and put your suggestions in the comments.

The skin was pretty hard to cut, I had to get my sharpest knife.

I’d grown this cucurbit for a few years, always admiring its resilience and ability to scale the trees in my garden.

The thought was this: I can’t really grow bottle gourds in my climate, but I’ve proven that Sharkfin melon loves this damp place, so why not re-purpose the shell as a water container.

This then rapidly evolved to using it as a plant pot.

So I present to you, a Chocolate Mint in Sharkfin Melon Plant Pot.

I don’t know how well the shell will deal with the dampness, but it’s a delightful sight compared to the usual heartless plant pots.

What’s the most unusual thing you’ve repurposed as a plant pot?

I bumped into an unfamiliar flower on a familiar walking route the other day and I wanted to make a quick note about it.

It’s Tragopogon pratensis, or possibly T. minor, but either way it’s in the delightfully named goatsbeard (salsifiy) family. The Wikipedia article has this casual throwaway sentence in it:

The roots can be boiled and eaten like potatoes.

I mean, you just can’t drop that kind of sentence and not talk about the implications. Goatsbeard just grows out in the meadows. What about the potential for domestication? How about we have a polyculture of Silverweed and Goatsbeard, then we just take a shovel and harvest spadeful after spadeful of excellent food?

Has anyone tried this plant?

I have a two year old Poncirus trifoliata (Citrus trifoliata) lemon tree that I’m currently torturing on a windy, north facing fence. If it manages to grow past the fence, it can get a pretty decent day long sun. I’m looking forward to talking to guests about home grown (pithy) lemons.

In the back garden, there’s a pomegranate tree that I will only ever get foliage from. If climate change accelerates, there’s an off chance I can get fruit. This tree is six years old now. It’s looking happier nowadays, but still no flowers despite the south facing aspect.

The last plant I want to show you is my cast iron plant, Aspidistra elatior, which was put outside in a last bid effort to revive it after being house bound since its inception. It’s been sheltered outside all winter in a rickety cold frame but has been out for a few months. It loves being outside - having an actual ecosystem in the soil rather than sterilised substrate helps too. I’ve seen examples of this plant in the wild in warmer countries, but it’s nice that it can survive outside with minimal help.

What plants are you pushing beyond their comfort zone? What are your motivations? For me, I just like talking about plants.

In between my last post about these mutants and now, it’s been about one month. In that time period, the original mutant died back completely. I’d given up hope but then last week I noticed some green. Fast forward to now and we’ve got a strong looking Silverweed plant coming up.

My main question is whether it’s shrugged off my chemical meddling. There’s two quite different looking leaves in this photo. On the right, the leaflets don’t have any serations on the edges. The venation is also less marked. Time will tell.

In other news, I wanted to show off part of my mini forest garden for which this substack is named after.

No, it’s not some lawless jungle. There are rules. Let me list the edible plant species in this photo. There’s an apple tree which everything sits underneath. The herbaceous plants include: Silene dioica, Rumex obtusifolius, Malva (unknown sp.), Mentha suaveolens, Artemisia abrotanum, Rudbeckia laciniata, Symphytum × uplandicum 'Bocking 14', Brassica oleracea (wild collected, 2m tall), Helianthus tuberosus, Origanum vulgare, Solanum dulcamara, Argentina anserina, Allium schoenoprasum.

I think there’s more but I’m not in the garden right now. I just put everything close together and do some judicious pruning if one plant tries to smother another (usually, it’s the Comfrey with its ridiculously large leaves) or the applemint which gets a little tall.

It’s all one big (dys)functional family, and I’m just a caretaker.

I keep a mildly obsessive lookout for unusual plants wherever I happen to be. In my neighbourhood I like to think I’m acquainted with every type of stubborn weed that grows up between pavement cracks and out of the mortar in a crumbling wall. So when I spot one I don’t immediately recognise, my dog sits there and wonders why I’m fixated on this weird plant when there’s a cat she can chase on the next driveway.

The most recent example of this stopped me dead in my tracks, a splash of yellow and green. Looking closer, what appears to be a variegated maple sapling. I am not super-sure if it’s a sycamore (Acer pseudoplatanus); my tree identification skills are lacklustre.

If you search around online, these fancy variegated sycamores sell for a high price (2 to 3 year old tree fetching north of sixty pounds stirling).

And here is one, growing between the crack of my wall and a pavement in my local neighbourhood.

I’m starting to think that areas like this - waste ground, high mineral content pavement cracks etc - stress out seedlings and cause weird mutations.

I believe the fancy kinds are all cloned from cuttings, so if this little guy survives any weeding I’ll be coming for it with some scissors in the autumn.

• Potentilla crantzii (Alpine Cinquefoil)

• Potentilla erecta (Tormentil)

• Potentilla indica (False Strawberry)

• Potentilla nepalensis (Nepal Cinquefoil)

• Potentilla neumanniana (Spring Cinquefoil)

• Potentilla recta (Creeping Cinquefoil)

And the Silverweed I’ve had a go at number only two:

• Argentina anserina (Common Silverweed)

• Argentina pacifica (Pacific Silverweed)

Of the Cinquefoils, Alpine Cinquefoil did not naturalise and Spring Cinquefoil did not like my microclimate. A pity about Alpine Cinquefoil because I nutured it from a baby and it survived strongly for two years before dying off completely without any children.

Of the Silverweeds, I had zero germination from Pacific Silverweed but sent some seeds to a nursery who managed to bring up seven starts.

The tormentil has established nicely underneath a dwarf oak in my front garden but is far less vigorous than I thought it would be. I also have a potted sample for future hybrid experiments. Despite the tiny flowers, it and Nepal Cinquefoil’s blooms produce the most pollen.

False Strawberry, P. indica, was transplanted from a friend’s garden into a shady flower bed. It is engaged in a complicated N-way war with Sweet Woodruff (Gallium odoratum), Caucasian Spinach (Hablitzia tamnoides), Lesser Celandine (Ficaria verna) and others. The crunchy, large, tasteless fruit is always fun to see and eat. You can see it forming from very early on.

I decided to plant out some Creeping Cinquefoil (Potentilla erecta) underneath my fig tree and Asian pear tree last autumn. Just waiting for this one to explode out of control (in a good way). I rescued this sample from the gravel of a footpath a few miles from my house. No idea how it was getting any nutrient. It has responded well to actual soil.

And obviously, Common Silverweed is just growing up everywhere. I’ve completely lost track of what I planted and what has self seeded and what has creeped to where, but that’s fine. I see all types of phenotypes, including an albino one. The other day I pulled a small storage root straight from some loose soil and cooked it into my lunch.

If you think there’s another Silverweed or Cinquefoil I’m missing, please leave a comment. Especially if there’s another Silverweed because I think there’s only two that are not impossible to get ahold of.

What am I trying to achieve by collecting all these Silverweed and Cinquefoil? I don’t know.

I just like collecting them.

I like getting to know them like old friends, their characters and quirks and likes and dislikes.

Read that article if you’d like, I did spend a lot of time on it and I think it genuinely has some original stuff that even an LLM can’t (yet) dig out of the dark corners of the webs.

I just wanted to keep up this small but more frequent article posting pattern. I think I have smaller thoughts more often than bigger thoughts, so maybe it will all work out.

My last post talked about the unfathomable virtues of my paving slabs for breeding wildly different Silverweed phenotypes, and I wanted to just show the world what I think is a self-seeded Potentilla nepalensis I levered up from those same slabs last year.

Outstanding characteristics include: darker green leaves, deeper venation, more leaflets on each leaf.

It has occurred to me that this may be some spontaneous hybrid. In my garden last year I had P. crantzii, P. recta, P. erecta, P. indica, P. reptans, A. anserina (silverweed). I am babying this plant through to bloom and crossing my fingers that there’s some P. reptans blood in there somewhere.

I could be wrong, but I don’t mind. Hybrids are great, but I’ve recently been discovering the joy of spontaneous self-seeding.

I’m also naturally very curious, and I’ve noticed that I’ve been “talking” to LLMs a lot. I ask them questions like: “What genus of plant contains only edible species?”, “What is difference between two obscure subspecies of <insert plant/animal”, “Research viable rootstocks for Japanese Flowering Quince”. The questions and answers flow like a never-ending fountain, and I have learned more than I have more quickly than I ever have in the last few months.

I like to think I have good questions, and I’ve maybe been kidding myself that I fact-check the LLM output.

All this to say, I’ve been pondering what the future of this substack is in light of this newest pseudo-AI development.

suggested that I write off the cuff, spontaneously, pressing “publish” straightaway. It’s something I’ll flirt with anyway. I definitely get burned out easily from researching things like the edibility of Buddleja.

Anyway, back to regular Silverweed thoughts.

You’ll hopefully remember that my last report talked about mutating Silverweed stolons with caffeine. I’m here to report that one of the two mutated stolons survived (the other slowly produced smaller and smaller leaves until it withered away). Compared to the parent (which has also withered away!), the mutant baby has less serrated leaves, plus, each leaflet is spaced further apart.

I have questions about vigour (there doesn’t seem to be much) in the mutant. I will have to baby this thing if I want to mutate it again.

In related news, perhaps I should not bother with any silverweed breeding and let my paving slabs do the work. There’s something about the conditions there that have attracted a plethora of different Silverweed phenotypes.

If you look very carefully, you’ll see a an albino Silverweed (Whiteweed) in the centre of one of the photos. This isn’t some random transitory thing, this paving slab had a half albino last year too.

Until next time.

I decided to compile a related list of my favourite Potentilla common names. Plants in the Potentilla family are also known as the Cinquefoils. They often have five leaflets per leaf, but can range from three to fifteen leaflets. Common Silverweed used to be in the Potentilla family before they were split off into the underwhelmingly named Argentina family. Potentilla derives from the Latin potens which means strong, and the suffix -illa which means small or diminutive. It’s my favourite genus name.

Before we begin, you might ask what I’m using as a source for these common names. Luckily for me, the iNaturalist species list for Cinquefoils has this covered. There’s also another list here.

1. Seven-leaved Cinquefoil

Potentilla heptaphylla

An iron name, my best of the bunch. At least there are actually seven leaflets or this would just be plain ridiculous.

2. Tormentil

Potentilla erecta

Most Potentilla follow the pattern of “Adjective” Cinquefoil but Tormentil bucks this trend. The common name derives from the latin tormentila (“minor pain”) as it was used for a lot of minor ailments in part due to its high tannin content.

3. Pretty Cinquefoil

Potentilla pulchella

Just in case you don’t agree, the common name insists this Cinquefoil is pretty. The middle leaflet has five leaflets, so if you squint it still fits the five-leaf category. This plant changes form dramatically depending on location.

4. Fan-leaf Foil

Potentilla flabellifolia

Beautiful poppy-like flowers, elegant fan-shaped leaves, what’s not to love?

5. Bigflower cinquefoil

Drymocallis fissa syn. Potentilla fissa

This one is a cheat entry due to reclassification but I love the bold name. I think fissa is vulgar latin for party or holiday.

Nutrient dense food is hard to obtain. As a society, we have collectively broken our backs, then the backs of our machines, to get our hands on high calorie food. As my friend likes to taunt me with, “most weeds are rabbit food”. Now, I don’t take these kinds of comments lying down and I’ll probably consider anything that moves, so when I was stood on my sodden English lawn, pondering about mud it occurred to me that there might be abundance of sustaining food below my squelching feet.

Yes, that’s right. Earthworms. You can turn away now if you want.

The way I see it, worms are pretty much nature’s equivalent of the Peperami (or Slim Jim) if you’re American. Just (processed) meat, though in this case, it’s encased in a nice jacket of soil.

Pound for pound, or gram for gram, earthworms are higher in protein than beef. Of beef, pork, egg, salmon and chicken, only chicken has a comparable protein percentage.

I’ve made similar claims about carbohydrate and silverweed (versus the potato), but don’t worry, I’m only just beginning to muse about the hybridisation of different earthworm species…

When I was younger, I heard rumours that some people ate earthworms medicinally but I discounted this fact until very recently. There’s all kinds of medicinal compounds in worms which you’ll likely lose if you process them into a flour for the fainthearted. And I do mean that: apparently some tribes in India extract earthworm mucus and give it to their kids to prevent asthma. Much research remains for the health benefits of earthworms.

Earthworms belong to the Lumbricidae family, of which at least two genus are mentioned in literature: Eisenia, named after an American scientist and sometimes called rosy worms, and Lumbricus, of unclear etymology.

In Britain, if you want to get all native foody, the lob worm (Lumbricus terrestris) is the largest and the only deep burrowing worm.

There are companies that are already producing earthworm flour for incorporation (hiding) in regular baked goods like breads and cakes, but some areas don’t shy away from the worm’s true form and will cook earthworms with pieces of bamboo, or straight up serve grilled earthworms on sticks.

I’ve thrown up mixed results for what earthworms actually taste like. Some say it tastes quite earthy, but I would volunteer that they taste a lot like the last thing they eat given they’re basically meat-socks. So maybe let them have a drink of milk or apple puree before processing would work well.

Final Thoughts

So, do you have the stomach for it? Or perhaps you will opt to sneak an earthworm into your diet in flour form, or go the more culturally acceptable route of insect powder.

Start firing up that vermicomposter.

Until next time.

Further Reading

• Earthworms: A Source of Protein

• Earthworms as an alternative protein source for human consumption: Nutritional value, sustainability, processing, and safety considerations—A systematic review

• Eisenia foetida flour, straight to your home

The second type of plant breeding advancement is really where people like myself shine, who are not traditionally educated but have their hands dipped into many pots.

I wrote an essay about my aspirations with Silverweed (Potentilla anserina, syn. Argentina anserina) two and a half years ago. I outlined my plans for increasing the edibility of Silverweed which included concepts like hybridisation and land race breeding to increase the root size.

This second type of advancement is nothing like that.

Let me explain.

I was listening to my good friend’s podcast () and was particularly inspired by the story of Sebastian Coccioba, an amateur plant breeder who has created his own home-lab for plant experiments.

Along with inspiration from and and dialog with an LLM, I came up with a mad cap DIY kitchen solution for increasing Silverweed root size. (And no, the LLM did not write this article.)

And I do mean that, I’m not using any tools and chemicals that you can’t buy from your local supermarket or garden centre (or online retailer).

Let’s reiterate the plan that kicked off this Substack.

I want to increase the size of Silverweed roots so they’re more worthwhile to harvest. Apart from root size, they are almost the ideal staple crop: self propagating (like strawberries), nutritious (more so than potatoes), great ground cover, maintenance free, shade tolerant, and on and on.

However: the roots are thin straggly things, less than a pencil thick in most cases and hard to scrub clean for cooking. They often snap off when you try and harvest them unless grown in a container.

The hybridisation experiments I’ve been documenting have lead me to conclude that they’re very weak seed bearers. They prefer to spread their stolons out and will only reluctantly flower if perfect conditions are met, or if they feel like they’re about to die.

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So, what can we do? I only cosplay patience (sometimes); if I don’t have to sit around for years breeding tiny little flowers then I won’t.

It turns out that inducing polyploidy in a plant tends to exaggerate various plant traits (flower colour, plant size, vigour and more) - it’s heavily used in the ornamental plant industry. Polyploidy is where the cells of an organism have more than two paired sets of chromosomes. It’s less common in animals than plants, and an alleged 30% of crops we eat are polyploids.

If we induce polyploidy in Silverweed, we will probably see thicker/stouter roots (in exchange for decreased length). In one blow, we can make them easier to harvest and easier to clean.

Typically, polyploidy is induced in a plant with a mutagenic chemical. The usual culprit is Colchicine which has some pretty toxic properties and very narrow “therapeutic index” (as in, get the dose wrong and you’re in trouble).

Surveying the literature, I discovered some food safe alternatives.

Candidates include Monosodium glutamate (yes, the white powder associated with western fast food) and caffeine.

It was at this point my excitement became too much to bear and theory met reality. I went into my half-light winter garden and ferreted out some Silverweed crowns, which I washed clean and placed in some sterile store-bought compost. I placed a heat mat on a filing cabinet, the pots upon that and some LED growing lights above the whole thing. A few days later, the Silverweed broke dormancy and two weeks after that tried to grow a flower(!) which I pinched off. A week after that a stolon was being sent out to colonise the rest of my office.

I opted for caffeine, but then I had to figure out how to apply it to maximise my chances of chromosome doubling.

It turns out that we can turn the vegetative propagation tendencies of Silverweed against itself. The stolons it sends out are segmented, with each node first sending up a small leaf bud, then a small swelling on the opposite side becomes the roots. These runners are why Silverweed is seen by many ornamental gardeners as a pest.

I mixed a crushed caffeine tablet between two spoons (200mg) with 10g of lanolin (caffeine first dissolved in a few drops of rubbing alcohol), and then applied it to one of these nodes. Importantly, I poked a needle into the very centre of the leaf bud so that the waxy mixture could soak into the undifferentiated (stem) cells that would become leaf cells. The root nubs are already ideal for absorbing the mixture.

I wrapped the nodes in aluminium foil for 48 hours, uncovered them and tried to wash the greasy lanolin mixture off without much success, and placed the nodes in another pot of soil so they would root. I could tell that the caffeine had an effect because some nodes were brown and burnt looking. Some nodes survived though.

Now I’m sat here, waiting for some tender green shoots to emerge from the satellite pot, wondering whether the caffeine mixture was too toxic for the nodes. The caffeine mix was applied to the leaf and root sides of the nodes, but if doubling only happened on one side I wouldn’t be able to tell unless I expose the root.

I’ll be watching out for significantly different leaf morphology from the nodes, perhaps darker green leaves, or significantly different texture or weight.

My back up plan is to buy some caffeine gel packs that endurance athletes eat. They’re the perfect concentration already and easily washed off (unlike lanolin!).

Final Thoughts

Before we go, let’s recap the ingredients list and add them to your weekly shop:

• Heat mat (optional)

• Grow lights

• Caffeine tablets (200mg)

• Lanolin or petroleum jelly

• Rubbing alcohol

• Aluminium foil

• Sewing needle

• Compost

• Plant fertiliser (the compost will run out of nutrient)

If this works, it’s more proof that your every day person can start a crude yet effective homelab to alter plant genetics.

It's worth thinking about other plants that root with stolons, because the same trick can be applied to those. Perhaps you want a more vigorous ground elder? Now's your chance!

There's variations on a theme to this type of mutagenesis, from changing up the mutagen (for example, hydrogen peroxide or UV light) to targeting a different part of that plant (like the seed or the pollen).

I might explore these options too, but different mutagens affect the genes in different ways and MSG/caffeine affect the genes in a way that is more likely to induce chromosome doubling than hydrogen peroxide (oxidation based mutation).

Until next time.

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Further Reading

• The Effect of Polyploidisation on the Physiological Parameters, Biochemical Profile, and Tolerance to Abiotic and Biotic Stresses of Plants

• Studies on Colchicine Induced Chromosome Doubling for Enhancement of Quality Traits in Ornamental Plants

• Effectiveness and efficiency of Monosodium Glutamate as a potential mutagen inducing polyploidy in Drimia indica (Roxb.) Jessop

• The Effect of Caffeine and Trifluralin on Chromosome Doubling in Wheat Anther Culture

• Effects of Polyploidization on Morphology, Photosynthetic Parameters and Sucrose Metabolism in Lily

• Comparative Analysis of Morphology, Photosynthetic Physiology, and Transcriptome Between Diploid and Tetraploid Barley Derived From Microspore Culture

• Wikipedia’s entry of Colchicine

Typical response to this generally include tomato breeding, but I’m talking perennial plants like trees and bushes.

It’s an issue of genetics. If you have two species you’d like to cross, you need to gather a large number of both types (especially if you factor in partial incompatibility). The traditional theory goes that the further the genetic distance between two species, the more breeding “attempts” before success.

There appear to be some techniques to get past this genetic barrier, and to read more about that, I refer you to the excellent (what a great name) Substack written by a friend where they discuss and more importantly practice mentor grafting and other brilliantly fantastic methods to chummy up two species

Back to the point, if your plot of land is small, you probably won’t be able to gather enough of your two target species to make a sufficiently large child pool (the so-called F1 generation). If you don’t have enough F1 genetic diversity, then your later generations will start to suffer from genetic bottling, that is, there won’t be enough genetic depth for a vigorous and expansive population. I read a lot of Science Fiction and sometimes the topic of the minimum viable population size pops up (in the context of space colonies, usually). Consensus varies for how many humans you need to have a thriving population, but could be as low as 8 females and 7 males.

One day, I was walking past a fruiting ornamental hedge and two thoughts struck me: “This an Elaeagnus × ebbingei hedge, you’ve been looking for a decent fruiting example for ages!”, followed shortly by the favourite Apple grower’s adage “Ah, but it won’t grow true from seed”.

Elaeagnus × ebbingei is a cross between Elaeagnus macrophylla and Elaeagnus pungens and is one of the very scant few evergreen (in mild frost), fruiting cold tolerant hedges out there.

I harvested the fruit anyway and planted the seed after shucking off the sweet-astringent pulp. A few months later, seedlings started germinating and I decided to up-pot these.

Suddenly, it occurred to me that I could take advantage of this hybridisation. Some tree nursery has already gone to the trouble of breeding and propagating the most vigorous F1 hybrid. Let’s use these genetics and see what crazy traits we can get in later generations.

We basically get to skip the initial (possibly boring) species breeding step and go straight to the fun plant trait lottery. There’s some trusting that the initial cross has enough depth, but I think the beauty of this idea is that the hybrid cultivars have already been tried in the fire of the cutthroat ornamental tree industry. If a cultivar wasn’t ridiculously hard wearing and tolerant of neglect, it would be weeded out by market forces.

So what down sides do we have? I can only think of two, and it’s really just one if you can expand your mind.

Firstly, you can’t be picky. If no existing hybrid cultivar exists on the market then that’s it unless you have some friends in high places.

This isn’t so bad though. All plants are fascinating anyway. My gripe is mainly that of these commercially available hybrids, only a subset would be edible.

The second is this: not all hybrids you can buy produce fertile seeds. In fact, some are specifically prized because of their infertility so they don’t become a nuisance, but given enough tries, even mules can sometimes bear offspring.

So where do we find a list of hybrids to start raiding? Where there is a market, there is a catalogue. In the UK, we have the venerable Royal Horticulture Society’s Award of Garden Merit. Read about it if you want, but I can summarise it as “plants that look good but are hard to kill”.

This substack is not my full time job, so I pointed a LLM at their 100+ PDF catalogue to extract the hybrids and group them into interesting themes.

Some enticing examples include:

• × Cuprocyparis leylandii, Leylandii

• × Mahoberberis aquisargentii, Hybrid mahonia

• Erica × darleyensis, Darley Dale heath

Leylandii is wildly popular in the UK because it grows like mad, and might be the cheapest way to make a hedge. There’s what I will call a fan site devoted to this conifer. It’s a hybrid between Monterey cypress (Cupressus macrocarpa) and Nootka cypress (Cupressus nootkatensis) and is generally infertile, though there is speculation that if you back cross it with the original parent you can get some F1b seedlings.

Hybrid mahonia is again very popular in British gardens. It’s a cross between Mahonia and Berberis (which are so taxonomically similar that they might end up in the same genus one day). The Mahonia species also belongs to that special group of cold tolerant evergreen trees that bear edible fruit.

Darley Dale heath is a cross between E. carnea and E. erigena. It’s special amongst the heathers because it can tolerate all soil types. There’s a decent chance that the heather you pick up from a garden centre is a Darley Dale heath. You can plant this one in a tricky barren spot of your food forest to benefit pollinators and for medicine.

There’s plenty to be excited about. If you broke past the infertility barrier of Leylandii with back crossing then you could get start a whole new species of incredibly fast growing edible conifers. Hybrid mahonias don’t need much work, they’re incredibly tough anyway but you could probably look for sweeter or plumper progeny (or the moon-shot of removing the spiky leaves). Both Darley Dale heath and Hybrid mahonias have plenty of cultivars out there which means it’s an easy cross, but it’s always fun to explore plant traits.

So as usual, walk around your neighbourhood and browse your country’s plant catalogues and see what interesting hybrids lurk in plain sight. If you like, have a look at the series I wrote on how to cheaply and rapidly stock a food forest.

Happy New Year, and happy plant breeding.

Until next time.