Allotments 4 All
Produce => Edible Plants => Topic started by: ACE on July 10, 2020, 08:30:53
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a copy of a letter going around.
There is a rogue batch of courgettes out there is season, be warned
Hello everyone and I am the social media manager for Mr Fothergill’s. As posted by Mark Carroll above, we have recently become aware of this issue with a small number of people being in touch with our Customer Services team about bitter courgettes. The variety involved is Courgette Zucchini with batch code I printed on the back of the packet next to the barcode. We have withdrawn all stocks of this seed immediately, recalled all stocks in garden centres and are currently contacting customers we know to have bought this variety by mail order.
We are very sorry to hear of the discomfort suffered by anyone who has an affected plant, though there seem to be only some rogue seeds amongst the batch, with some packets causing no problem at all. As pointed out in this thread already, it has likely resulted from an inadvertent cross-pollination in the plants that produced the seeds. We would urge anyone who has a packet of these seeds to get in contact with us by email on debbie.porter@mr-fothergills.co.uk
If you have grown a plant from these seeds, you can taste-test the fruits before consuming them by cutting them a licking the flesh. Affected fruits are extremely bitter and an indication you should destroy the plant. Please do not consume the fruits of any plants that have produced bitter tasting fruits.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
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Sounds very suspect to me. Cross pollinated squash can be bitter but this doesn't sound right.
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I had a bit of an internet trawl, and going that letter was originally posted on a Brighton and Hove allotments page in 2013! One person who said he was ‘poisoned’ had stomach cramps after eating a bitter courgette.
There is a recent comment from someone this year which says they have suffered a similar thing. The variety is sold out on Fothergills website with no comment or press release about this.
I wouldn’t eat a bitter cucumber..of indeed anything else that didn’t taste good, who eats a whole meal of something horrid?! Let your tongue be your guide say I.....!
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Just another wind up then, thought so.
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I have read loads of posts online in which people are complaining about this so I wouldn't be too quick to dismiss it completely.
I do like how one of the posts on the Brighton and Hove allotments page is from Mr Di Rhea though..
The RHS even mentions it https://www.rhs.org.uk/advice/profile?pid=676
"The bitter taste of some fruit is caused by an over-production of plant defence chemicals called ‘cucurbitacins’. This is mainly a problem in courgettes and summer squash and is caused primarily by a mutation within the plant. The problem is more likely when plants are grown from saved seeds, where inadvertent cross-pollination may have occurred. Affected fruit should not be eaten as it causes stomach upsets and affected plants should be removed."
There are even reports of a death in Germany associated with tainted courgettes..
https://www.thelocal.de/20150821/courgette-stew-kills-pensioner-in-heidelberg.
It's a real thing..
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It's real and is most likely to happen with open pollinated courgettes especially if one parent is an ornamental gourd - a good reason to stick to named varieties and not volunteers in your compost bin.
Eating a bitter courgette can cause discomfort and, in severe cases, diarrhoea and stomach cramps.
https://lancaster.unl.edu/hort/articles/2007/bittercuke.shtml
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Looks like quite a few people have been ill this year after eating even a bit of one of these bitter courgettes. They are "Courgette Zucchini" from Mr Fothergill's
https://www.bhaf.org.uk/content/advice/gardening-advice-a-z/poisonous-courgette-warning
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Fothergill recall - https://www.mr-fothergills.co.uk/Home/Product-Recall-MRF/#.Xw9h-CgzaM9
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It looks as if that seed company is not to be trusted. If it has happened in the past (2013) and they didn't put it right. How many other varieties of seed are rogue? There's us thinking it is the soil/compost, something we done wrong or weather conditions when all along it is just crappy seed. The prices are steadily rising on everything garden related and the quality has gone down. I have tools over 50 years old that have more life in them than the modern stuff. Compost is just tip waste, it goes on and on.
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It etc are not acceptable in Europe. depends on whether they produce their own seeds and have failed on quality and pollination control or whether they buy their seeds in and their supplier has failed.
Either way, they've done the right thing in recalling the seeds and it' snot like it's a fault in a washing machine that sets homes and whole apartment blocks on fire.
As for tool quality, there's no profit margin in a spade that lasts 50 or 60 years unless you can charge outrageous prices to start with. As long as people want cheap we'll get shoddy good or else goods made in China where labour rights, conditions, pay levels are so much poorer than those in Europe. I'd rather go without or pay more to keep jobs in Europe than support a totalitarian regime.
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It makes a mockery of the "National List" which has cost us so many good "old/heritage" varieties...
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It makes a mockery of the "National List" which has cost us so many good "old/heritage" varieties...
We lost a lot of those ourselves, the market is for 'exotics', years ago I would go to my local seedsman and buy an envelope of cabbage, sprouts carrots etc. a pint of beans or peas. Courgette! I don't want that foreign rubbish, give me some marrow seeds. Then the superfoods started along with cheap polys/green houses and the seed companies followed suite with seeds that some of us had never heard of. King Edwards used to fill the tater patch, who in their right mind would waste the space on small wonkey pink fir apple. Don't get me started on Garlic Bread :toothy10:
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I love Pink Fir Apple spuds - more flavour than just about any other spuds but I have been saving my own seed ones for about 8 years now.
I wouldn't write off "modern" seeds just because on seed supplier to one seed company had one batch of one type of one vegetable get pollinated by some sort of wild cucurbit. Bitter courgettes, cucumbers and squash have been a thing for ever - breeding has largely breed it out but every now and then you get problems - very rare though.
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Courgette and lemon marmalade. Yummy.
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Garden organic have a heritage seed library for those keen on conserving old varieties - https://www.gardenorganic.org.uk/hsl
I would get seriously bored eating "traditional" British veg every day. Not that keen on potatoes anyway but do love pink fir apple for flavour and texture. I'd rather grow more interesting veg that is either hard to find or very expensive or tastes better freshly picked.
Potatoes take up a lot of space, a lot of water and mature all at the same time so then you have to have suitable space to store them well. Curly kale is rarely offered here so I'm growing my own. Never seen PSB so growing that too. Limited range of pumpkins and squashes here so i'm growing spaghetti squash and Crown Prince but also yellow courgettes and Utchiki Kuri. Strawberries and blackberries are expensive so we have those too and, because we can here, 2 baby nectarine trees and a peach which are now big enough to plant out this autumn and we have a meyer lemon and a Limquat in pots so we can move them to the polytunnel in winter.
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I would get seriously bored eating "traditional" British veg every day.
So would I, but that is how is used to be when we grew veg in the back garden, especially in the 50's. I've lost count of the different veggies and fruits I have tried over the years but still like to grow a few of the basics, I would give it up if I couldn't get my weekly fix of savoy cabbage in the winter. Curly kale was known as hungry gap, and served with rabbit pie and floury spuds when there was little else to crop, Nero is nice but that is more likely to go with a tuna steak and refried beans nowadays.
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I believe Mr Fothergill subsidiaries include D T Brown and Johnsons, so does the problem go wider? As an aside, can someone remind me of the seed companies grouping, who owns what? Thanks.
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Unwins are now having trouble. Unless it is the compensation brigade lining up for some easy money.
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Someone just posted T&M are having issues too. I'll believe it when I see it - I fear that hysteria and bull may be spreading.
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Someone just posted T&M are having issues too. I'll believe it when I see it - I fear that hysteria and bull may be spreading.
Jumping on the bandwagon springs to mind....🙄 There’s always someone to blame for everything these days and where there’s blame follows a claim.....goodness knows what ridiculous new restrictions will follow to prevent ‘hazardous’ cross pollination at this rate!
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I have noticed this trend for the last couple of years, and I am beginning to think that it might not be entirely the seed merchants fault!
I get the feeling that" Weather change/ global warming" call it what you will has much to do with it !
I have noticed the seasons recently are out of kilter from what they used to be and this is IMHO may be throwing the plant's reproduction cycle out of kilter.
For instance; Winter as I knew winter have not been seen for a few years now, in fact if you take this year for example (although the effect on plant seed production will not be seen until next year) you will recall:
January / February very wet, and we had ‘the floods’.
March was a bit indifferent.
April was glorious summer weather
May was rather like what I would expect in Spring.
June was a mixed bag but generally cool for the time of the year.
July seems to be similar to June.
I have noticed with my Spring Bulbs most of them have not produced flowers and I put this down to the leaves dying back in the warm weather before they have charged up the bulbs for the next season.I always liked to allow my leaves to die back over a 5-6 week period this April they were gone in less than a fortnight.....so I am expecting even fewer flowers next year!
Is a similar thing affecting the seeds we are buying now i.e. the seeds are not ‘viable’ or are affected in some way that they are producing rogue plants because of the ‘non-seasonal’ weather????
Then there is the other matter that has appeared over the last few years; compost recipes have changed so much so that I often call Multi-Purpose Compost as Not Fit for Purpose Compost!as much of it is!
This year I have had problems with my compost where I lost hundreds of seedlings!( I mentioned this n a previous thread)
For those that survived growth was extremely poor particularly if my plants were containerised. Plants that I managed to plant into the beds in my garden are performing as they have always done for me.
Why?????
Well at first I blamed the compost recipe and thought that some herbicide had got into the mix through using recycled garden compost,e.g. aminopyralid! But I have now discounted that because my symptoms were not as I encountered them a few years ago when ‘aminopyrald’ first raised its ugly head!
So what was giving me my problems ?
I found that seedlings I planted out in the beds performed as I would expect them to do but the stuff in containers suffered! They just did not develop!
It was not till I pulled up a few plants & seedlings from the container that I found that generally the roots had not developed! I found that with seedlings the roots had not developed feeding & water roots they were a brown coloured single stemmed (tap root). Established plants had a mass of black lifeless roots!
This got me to thinking pH.
As I didn’t have a reliable pH meter I googled dozens and read all the reviews and finally purchased one that had the least negative reviews rather than one that had lots of good reviews....yes I am a sceptic!
When it arrived I tested it in various situations I stuck the prongs into a bag of lime and yes it recorded a high number and when I stuck it in a bag of peat it recorded a low acid reading. So fine, it was indicative of what it should do but I have no way of establishing if the individual readings were accurate.
Then I stuck it in a few containers that had suffering plants in and I found the soil/compost was generally under 6 and on occasions as low as 5!
So no wonder I was having problems!
But how had this happened? I pondered lots of things e.g my collected water in the water tub might be acidic, but then this was what I also used on plants that were OK, so I discounted that!
I wondered if the Perlite I had added to the compost to aid drainage might be the cause but when I stuck the probes into the bag of Perlite it registered neutral.
So what could it be then I had a ‘eureka’ moment I decided to test the new & unused compost and lo and behold it was ‘acidic’ so much so it generally registered just under 6 and on one occasion as low as 5.
I had now found my answer.
So now I have adjusted the pH of all my compost with the aid of a bag of Lime I had from my Allotmenteering days!
I purchased a bag of Peat ( Bl**dy hell! That has got expensive) perhaps this is to put people off buying it! In fact one supplier commented by saying making compost this way is “Old School” I replied “ Well I m Old!
Another factor I have noticed is: How wet my compost gets! OK if plants were dying they wouldn’t be using the moisture but I think it is more than that!
The suppliers are tending to use the sales jargon “This compost has a wetting agent in it” but to me I think this is counterproductive.
OK in days of old when Peat based composts dried they were very difficult to re-wet but now with peat free/reduced composts this is not a problem IMHO.
In fact, I think it is the wetting agent that is over wetting the compost resulting in drowned plants!
Which reminds me of a piece of advice I was given when I took up gardening that advice was; “More plants are killed through ‘overwater’ rather than ‘under watering’
I will end this epic here despite the fact that I could go on and on about how the ‘Amateur Gardener’is suffering but the Commercial Gardeners do not seem to suffer this problem.
Could the comment on the compost bag “Not suitable for Commercial Use” be a clue to this!.... I will say no more!
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Simply put, post Brexit the EU seed regulations are no longer in force. And there are no British seed regulations yet. In this vacuum it is buyer beware, who you trust. :wave:
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I'm finding that compost - and I'm trying a lot of different peat-free and lower peat types as well as old favourites - doesn't keep nourishing seedlings for more than three or four weeks.
I grow a lot of brassicas, for example. I've started to plant them on into smallish pots, or trays with large modules, with a pinch of slow-release fertiliser, rather than plant them out straight from module trays.
I've never felt the need to do this before. Although it's partly to do with increased flea beetle attacks and the wish to have bigger plants before planting out, it is also caused by a change in bought compost.
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Galina - EU regulations still apply in the present transition period and the Government is unlikely to relax that sort of thing much from 1 January 2021 either.
JanG - agreed, I realised things were just standing still, so I now put a few chicken manure pellets in each module / pot.
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There appears to be no system such as the John Innes and Levington formulae for compost qualities here so it's hit and miss depending on what brand they have in stock. Two years ago I bought a batch that turned out to be full of weed seeds and now I'm forever pulling up a very weedy form of persicaria.
I have found one I now favour for seed sowing and cuttings but it is just plant material and no loam so when I pot on I mix in some soil from molehills now to give a bit more body and I add pelleted manure. I use another MPC type for soil conditioning.
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My Husband spotted this and every time I have brought a courgette home lately he has asked "Have you licked that?" No problems here - yet! :blob7:
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Tiny Clanger. no need to lick every one. The whole plant is either bitter or not. Enough to lick the first fruit. :wave:
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My Husband spotted this and every time I have brought a courgette home lately he has asked "Have you licked that?" No problems here - yet! :blob7:
Evokes memories of the Cadbury's flake advert :glasses9:
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...which goves me an excuse to get this out (ooer) - third verse:
https://halfmanhalfbiscuit.uk/back-again-in-the-dhss/dickie-davies-eyes/
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This thread reminds me of a case of contamination in the whole country's (USA) commercial seed of Delicata squash. From Wild Garden Seed's website:
Have any other fresh market growers had a dreaded case of “bitter poison Delicatas?” GTF’s padrone, John Eveland, had more than one market customer approach him in autumn of 2000 with terrifying accounts of throat clenching bitterness from a single bite of his perfect Delicata squash. The victims were so emphatic, the threat of legal action so palpable, that John began calling every Delicata source in the country to find out exactly where his seed came from, and to make sure he didn’t plant seed from the same lot again.
Turns out, every dealer in the USA had seed from the same field in Colorado, and this huge lot was very slightly contaminated by the bitterness gene found in C. pepo gourds. Perhaps one bitter squash in several thousand...What to do? John had kept his own Delicata seed from 1988 thru 1994 (when he went over to buying commercial seed). We went into the freezer to find his old selection, and used this for stock seed in 2001. We found the fruits longer and more uniform, finer textured, sweeter, and significantly longer keeping than other strains. Other local farmers report the same. We’ve never had a report of a bitter squash from this line. Not one.
We have concentrated on making this the best long-keeping Delicata you can find. While no pepo-type squash will ever keep like a Hubbard or other maxima-type, we believe that ‘Zeppelin’ is the only Delicata you will still be eating in mid-January. Buttery-cream colored with longitudinal green stripes, fruits weigh 1 to 2 lbs, up to 6 good fruits per plant. Skin is tender enough to eat, the flesh is thick, a rich orange color, with a higher average brix than other available strains. As we say every time we eat it, this is good Delicata. Rock ’n’ Roll Delicata, in fact.
https://www.wildgardenseed.com/product_info.php?cPath=51&products_id=141