Woodford's green marrow. — 3 feet in height; pods large, flat, containing six large well-flavoured peas, and an excellent bearer. Edzell Blue is a Scottish beauty from the early 1900s. Its flavour is nice but not wildly exciting, and I still haven't found how to cook it to best advantage

This is the hybrid I made on behalf of the Real Seed Catalogue, in the hope of developing a good purple-podded mangetout for them. Although I'm far from self-sufficient (until I find a way of growing chocolate biscuits in the garden it's never going to happen) I am now eating home-grown food pretty much on a daily basis. And the leguminous crops are doing especially well just now, so I've been having a big harvest day to get some of the surplus into the freezer. Burbage's eclipse.—From 18 inches to 2 feet; seed large — from five to six in a pod; blue when ripe. An excellent bearer, having the young pease of a very proper size. Known also as Stubb's dwarf. Not so early as Bishop's new long pod; it is, however, a good dwarf pea for summer crops.

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Joanne Coates' work has featured in The Guardian, BBC, Financial Times, The Telegraph and The British Journal of Photography. She is a winner of the Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Awards, and in 2021 she was a joint awardee of the Jerwood / Photoworks Prize, making this exhibition one not to be missed. I'm beginning to think my destiny here is to run some larger scale and more scientifically rigorous trials of purple-podded peas. The thing is, they've only just started appearing commercially in the last couple of years and are still something of a novelty ... so most of the ones you come across in catalogues are just called Purple Podded (the only named variety I've seen is Ezetha's Krombek Blauwschok). But the big differences between mine and the one in the Rococo Garden clearly shows they aren't all the same variety. Some are advertised as having purple flowers, others pink, others bicoloured. Mine have large sweet peas while the Heligan vegetable book describes their purple-podded peas as "virtually inedible". So I'm going to buy up a selection of purple-podded varieties from anywhere I can find them and grow them all together next year for comparison. See how similar or different they really are. After I'd harvested a patch of Marfona potatoes the other day I found this lying on the ground. 'Scuse the state of my fingers.

Green pods and white flowers. Doesn't have many obvious Kent Blue traits at the F1 stage. It looks like Alderman, but nowhere near as vigorous. The F2 seed does look interesting though, with a mix of colours and round/wrinkled types. And incidentally, I'm not just being a cheapskate here: I rate ordinary bog-roll tubes more highly than the purpose-made root-trainers you can buy in garden centres. They're sturdy, porous and biodegradable. All lavatorial cardboard in our house is assiduously collected throughout the year for this purpose. I discovered the delights of ISSA following an appeal for help. A musician friend asked if I knew anywhere she could get seeds of James' Longkeeping onion, as she knows someone who's desperately trying to get hold of it. An English market garden favourite for nearly 200 years, ubiquitous in seed catalogues and mentioned in popular gardening books, it seemed to suddenly disappear. The bloke who wants it says he's been looking for it for 15 years, to no avail. It's his favourite ever onion which he grew for many years before it vanished, "sweet like an apple if you eats 'em raw, and keeps for ages", and he's never found another one as good.Bishop's new long pod— 2 feet; seeds white. A most abundant bearer, producing a succession of pods during most of the pea season. Like all dwarf peas of its class, it requires a rich soil, and from 4 to 6 inches between the seed in the line. We have had this pea producing a good supply for three months in succession. It is one of the most valuable sorts for small gardens, and for domestic use: its only fault in large establishments is the large size of the peas, but, although disliked by cooks on that account, it is much prized by them for many purposes. It originated with the late Mr David Bishop, author of "Casual Botany," and is a hybrid between Bishop's early dwarf, a pea of only 1 foot in height, and one of the marrowfats, carrying in itself the characters of both its parents. Looking at it from the outside I wondered if it might share some ancestry with Fortyfold, because I detect a certain similarity in the wispy streaks of colour in the skin. But it doesn't have the same texture or flavour. Dwarf imperial. — 4 feet in height; pods large, containing from eight to ten peas; a good bearer, and excellent for a late crop. Like all good sorts, has a host of names; viz., sabre, blue sabre, new sabre, dwarf sabre, imperial, blue imperial, dwarf green imperial, new improved imperial, new improved dwarf imperial, new dwarf imperial, new long-podded imperial, dwarf blue prolific, green nonpareil, blue scimitar, Sumatra. To the best of my knowledge, Prince Albert and Champion of England are the only ones that have survived to the present day. They're both very rare and can only be obtained through seed savers organisations. The hand-pollinations were ostensibly successful. I have several nice plump pods full of home-made F1 hybrid seeds waiting for the right moment for harvest, and have gathered in a few already. They don't generally have as many peas in them as a naturally self-pollinated pod, but that's normal.