My job was to help poor farmers in Africa grow better crops. I retired in 2017, acquired an allotment but, in 2021, an especially wet year, my outdoors tomatoes were wiped out by late blight.
Having an agricultural research background, I decided to find a late-blight-resistant tomato. And it had to be nice to eat. So, the next year, I tested nineteen late blight-resistant varieties of tomato and a known susceptible control.
The fruits of most were generally not great to eat (thick skin, tasteless). But two or three, especially one called Primabella, did taste great!
A summer drought occurred that year (2022), causing some to suffer blossom end rot. Late blight only arrived with autumnal heavy rain which, to add insult to injury, also caused the fruits of some varieties to split! But the biggest surprise was that, as well as the susceptible control, late blight destroyed over half the supposedly resistant varieties!
But some varieties did survive all these adversities, including Primabella plus the related Resibella (though its fruit seemed not quite so nice). That year, we were still eating these outdoor-grown tomatoes in November, by which time none of the other varieties were yielding anything edible!
I had found my variety. And I am not alone in praising Primabella. Thompson & Morgan describe Primabella as the ‘first late blight resistant cherry tomato for UK gardeners to grow outdoors’ – confirmed by several smaller specialist companies such as Victoriana. And the folks at Real Seeds mentioned how they, like us, were still eating outdoor-grown Primabella tomatoes in November.
But what was fantastic was that, searching online, I discovered that both Primabella and Resibella had been bred by Dr Bernd Horneburg in the participatory Organic Outdoor Tomato Project at the University of Kassel in Germany.
Because some of the last projects I had led in Africa used participatory methods for breeding cassava and sweet potato varieties, ‘the scales fell from my eyes’. In developing countries, a gap often occurred between poor, semi-subsistence farmers and academically-educated scientists like me trying to help them. Participatory plant breeding bridged that gap by requiring plant breeders to work with the semi-subsistence farmers. In this way, it ensures the breeder understands the customers’ needs: in the jargon, the breeder is ‘client-orientated’.
This explained why Primabella is so good for my purposes too – small organic growers are not that different from allotment growers in the UK. And I became part of Bernd’s team.
Writing a book post-retirement on my life experiences also allowed me to see the enormity of the gap between most developed-world breeders who select the varieties that are sold to us, and gardeners.
The gap in this case is that most developed-country plant breeders don’t even want to know gardeners’ needs: they work for commercial companies and their breeding target is large-scale commercial growers.
And the fault is also that of our seed retailers who source most of their seeds from commercial seed supply chains. We gardeners are in a ‘fools’ paradise’, surrounded by masses of apparently wonderful varieties, unaware that most were not bred to serve our purposes!
It may also surprise most UK gardeners that about half the potato varieties released by Dutch breeders are also participatorily bred (read on!). And this is no mean achievement: the Dutch are the World’s leading exporters of seed potatoes! Participatory plant breeding isn’t just a whim; it’s a well-established, proven breeding method, despite being a fairly well-kept secret!
But Bernd had developed Primabella with organic growers, the Dutch breeders had worked with farmers. I realised that gardeners represented a special challenge for participatory plant breeding. And worldwide they are probably also getting a raw deal from seed retailers, like us in the UK! I doubt most are even aware of the value of participatory plant breeding.
So, I developed this website – as at least a good start!