Perennial/offsetting leek crosses

[12540dumont]

Templeton I struggle too with the well, is it going to be seed or are we going to eat it. Leo sort of shoved me aside and harvested everything that looked medium to small. Of course then the larger ones made offsets and many went to seed. And then I got busy. Seed was falling willy nilly everywhere. We finally bagged it by row and marker, but as I told Leo, there's no one out there to remind the bees that if they leap between the Jaune de Pitou and the F7, (which is really settled down now), and the Blue Solaise and the Scotland, please leave a note so we know how to bag them.

Leo is hopeless and insists on separating them by row and marker. I figure if I got them out of the field, off the plant and into the freezer, labeled Leeks and the year, I'm good. In 2011, the cat stepped in the seed tray and mixed leeks and onions together. I called that batch "Bad Kitty Blend" Leo calls it....Holly with too many seed trays going at one time.

I'm really happy to see all of you playing with onions and leeks. For a crop that we use all the time, I really don't thing there's enough regular folks working on this. I really love a good OP grex that stands up to what nature throws at it.

From drought to 5 inches of rain. (still in drought, it's just a storm! I need 40 inches more!) On December 10th I still had LIMA's blooming! Now I'm in lose your boot season.

[ottawagardener]

Bleu de Solaise was part of the original mix of LISP blue select. I think they were collecting all the blue in stress (cold) leeks so that would be why they were similar. They were massed crossed. The vigour of the original planting was and is really impressive. I hope to do some trading off between the size of LISP blue select and the perennially of Oerprei.

[mybighair]

Thanks for the info Frank. I've got a pearl onion from IPK that is pretty well established and some small plants of the two varieties from Deaflora, but they are all fairly fibrous so I don't use the greens.

I planed to cross them with leeks to develop a larger bunching leek for cut and come again use, but if Oerprei is better as a leek green it's worth me getting hold of it. It could save me some selection work in trying to get rid of the fibrousness in later generations.