Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes!!!

Everyone loves tomatoes - all sizes, shapes, and colors.  For instance, the Cherokee Purple Tomato.  It isn't really purple but more of a beautiful dark maroon with green on top.  That first year I bought four varieties of heirloom tomato plants from Seed Savers Exchange.  A novice at gardening, the space I left between plants in my garden made it very difficult to harvest later.  So many gorgeous tomatoes.  The Cherokee Purple are particularly sweet and juicy, perfect for tomato sandwiches and canned tomato juice.

The first seed I ever tried saving was a tomato seed.  Now several years later we have our own family variety.  I was told that tomato plants do not cross pollinate but I don't believe that's totally true.  Our family variety seems to be a conglomeration of those first four varieties that I purchased and planted so close together.  My friends, the pollinating insects, took care of spreading the pollen around.  Sharing it.

In my email yesterday I received this beautiful blog post on growing tomatoes organically.  Great information altogether in one short article.  Sharing it.

“The Seed Underground”

Janisse Ray writes, “The Seed Underground” is a love letter to the quiet revolutionaries who are saving our food heritage.

"Ray begins The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by explaining how we lost our seeds. Feeding ourselves has always been a burden for humans, she explains. “So when somebody came along and said, ‘I’ll do that cultivating for you. I’ll save the seeds. You do something else,’ most of us jumped at the chance to be free.”

But, according to Ray, when the dwindling number of farmers who stayed on the land gave up on saving seeds and embraced hybridization, genetically modified organisms, and seed patents in order to make money, we became slaves to multinational corporations like Monsanto and Syngenta, which now control our food supply.

In 2007, 10 companies owned 67 percent of the seed market. These corporations control the playing field, because they influence the government regulators. They’ve been known to snatch up little-known varieties of seeds, patent them, and demand royalties from farmers whose ancestors have grown the crops for centuries. The result is that our seeds are disappearing, and we miss out on the exquisite tastes and smells of an enormous variety of fruits and vegetables. More alarmingly, “we strip our crops of the ability to adapt to change and we put the entire food supply at risk,” Ray writes. “The more varieties we lose, the closer we slide to the tipping point of disaster.”

However, The Seed Underground is not a grim story. It’s a story about seeds, after all, which Ray calls “the most hopeful thing in the world.” Moreover, it’s a story about a handful of quirky, charismatic, “quiet, under-the-radar” revolutionaries, who harvest and stow seeds in the back of refrigerators and freezers across America."

Where Do Seeds Come From?

Starting a home vegetable garden can be overwhelming at first.  High Mowing's article offers helpful information.

How to Choose? Open-Pollinated vs. Hybrid Varieties

 
Choose well now.  Our options are diminishing rapidly.

According to the report, Monsanto has alleged seed patent infringement in 144 lawsuits against 410 farmers and 56 small farm businesses in at least 27 U.S. states as of January of 2013. Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta together hold 53 percent of the global commercial seed market, which the report says has led to price increases for seeds -- between 1995 and 2011, the average cost of planting one acre of soybeans rose 325 percent and corn seed prices went up 259 percent. 

Buy organic seeds.  Grow of your own food.  Get together with neighbors and start a community garden.  Learn how to save your own seed.  NOW.

Save the World's Seeds

Alert! Join Seed Savers Exchange in helping to save the Pavlovsk Station from development


A Russian court recently ruled that one of the world's most important seed banks near St. Petersburg, Russia may be destroyed in order to make way for a housing development. If allowed to stand, this decision will have a catastrophic impact on global plant diversity. Called a "living library", the Pavlovsk Experimental Station is widely considered the crown jewel of agricultural biodiversity, since 90% of the collection's varieties are not found anywhere else on the planet.

Join scientists and concerned people around the world in petitioning President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin to overrule the court decision. To learn more about this issue and to sign the petition, click on this link to the

Global Crop Diversity Trust

Tomatoes

YUM!!

Early March at Our House

Sprouts!!! The tomato and cucumber seeds I saved last year from my plants really sprouted and here's a photo to prove it. This is all so exciting! Right now they are under a small grow light in the living room.

But more than plants is going on at home...

Along with a major reorganize, clean out and clean up of the cellar, we had some plumbing updated. We were told that in order to properly vent the new drain in the basement, they would have to look into the bathroom walls!!!

So now we've started the remodel of the bathroom with a brand new toilet and spiff up of the heater.

So far, so good.

...and so do thoughts of Spring.

Amidst all the hubbub of the Holidays - to be or not to be - have come whiffs of Spring.

1. 2010 Seed Catalogs sit on my bedside stand.

2. Plans of enlarging our garden keep flying through my brain.

3. Yesterday at work a coworker brought a flyer to show me a Four-Shelved Mini Greenhouse on sale for $20. I don't know why she thought I needed to see it. Certainly not a gift-giving idea. Hubby and I just bought two!!

4. And now sitting out on the porch in the afternoon sunshine flipping through a gift issue of Better Homes and Gardens (January 2010 issue page 72), the only article I notice is Growth Fun, A Guide to Super-Simple Seed Starting. Ah, inspiration to disspell the gloom of cold, gray days waiting for Spring to arrive. Be still my heart!

The following is taken from this article:


How to Create Seed-Starting Pots From Newspapers -- powered by eHow.com

When selecting seeds, order heirloom seeds from a reputable place like Seed Savers Exchange, Bountiful Gardens, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, Fedco Seeds, Seeds of Change, or High Mowing Organic Seeds.

Read what's been happening with Monsanto and the whole world of genetically modified commercial seed development and control here.

LESSON: The Parable of the Mustard seed.
"With what can we compare the kingdom of God, or what parable shall we use for it? It is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when sown upon the ground, is the smallest of all the seeds on earth; yet when it is sown it grows up and becomes the greatest of all shrubs, and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the air can make nests in its shade."

Food for you

Hungry? What shall we eat?

A Nation of Farmers

Now prepare to plant what and where you have space.
Try an Earth Box. Try something.

The learning curve

Having decades of experience behind you, even in unrelated fields, can be very helpful when launching into something new. The standard questions of feasibility do apply but only to the known outline of what you are undertaking - the Roman numerals. What about the variables? A, B, C, ...like dirt, sunshine, nutrients, water, temperature, bugs, disease, human fatigue and body pain? Most of the magazine articles on gardening are stories, "I tried this and it didn't work" or "This worked after three years of adjustment". I plan to keep a running list of lessons learned.

LESSON: when planting seeds, don't plant all the seeds of a particular species in case the conditions aren't right and nothing sprouts. You'll then have seeds to start over.

I just received a copy of The New Seed-Starters Handbook by Nancy Bubel (six weeks after attempting to start my first seeds). She begins with this quote from Charles Dudley Warner, "To own a bit of ground, to scratch it with a hoe, to plant seeds and watch the renewal of life -- this is the commonest delight of the race, the most satisfactory thing a man can do." My husband, David, just left for Lowe's to pick up a hoe!

Is it too late to make a life change?

Spring has popped in New England. Seventy plus degrees today and I'm out digging up flowers rather than planting them. Nearly thirty years of day lilies, irises, peonies, and lily of the valley are giving room to heirloom vegetables - Cherokee Purple Tomato, Japanese Trifele Black Tomato, Australian Brown Onion, and Long Island Improved Brussels Sprouts - all started from seed and purchased from http://www.seedsavers.org/ . There is a bureau in my living room in front of the picture window with an old lamp, a couple house plants and a basket - the usual stuff, stuff I can't even find now since trays of little pots with little green leaves have taken over. In fact my home has been taken over with piles of seed packets, growing guides, how-to books, and five gallon buckets.

This blog is intended to track and share my life change progress. Can someone over 59 succeed in changing their life? My feet are in the water. Will the sea part?