I love to peruse my old seed catalog collection at this time of year. I am posting pics on Instagram pretty much daily - check them out - #gardenhistory @nctomatoman
On Saturday November 2, I had the opportunity to present my Container and Straw Bale gardening talk to an enthusiastic, warm and welcoming audience of gardeners as part of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association (CFSA) conference. It was my penultimate talk of 2019. On Thursday evening, November 7, I finished my 2019 speaking season with that same workshop at the East Regional Library in Knightdale, NC. It can be a challenge to entice folks to attend gardening talks as the nights grow long and cold weather approaches, and my audiences for all 7 of my fall Wake County Library talks showed that gardening is not the first thing on peoples’ minds in the fall. Yet I loved them all, and my sphere of local gardening friends continues to expand.
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Back to the CFSA meeting I briefly mentioned above. Over the last few months I became involved in a parallel meeting for the event, and was asked to help and participate in the Southeast Seed System meeting as part of more regional efforts of the Organic Seed Alliance. I really can’t say enough about how impressed I was at the talent, enthusiasm, focus and purpose of so many regional farmers, gardeners, seed and produce growers and seed company and agricultural area experts, all focused on guiding improvement in numerous aspects of regional seeds and farming. My role was primarily using my project management and team facilitation tools to ensure that the three days lead to clear ways to advance the loads of great ideas that emerged on those three days of workshops and discussions. What I didn’t expect is how many of my own gardening experiences - my decades as a seed saver, a tomato collector and historian, an amateur breeder - fit well with providing guidance to the group, and we’ve really only scratched the surface as this regional group forms and launches.
There were so many wonderful chances to interact with many like minded friends, old and new - Ira Wallace and others from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (one of my very favorite seed companies, and the one responsible for first making Cherokee Purple available in a seed catalog, back in 1993!), Chris Smith and Carol Koury of Sow True Seed and Chris’s own new venture, the Utopian Seed Project, Jacob Rutz of The People’s Seed, Melissa DeSa (our most welcome and delightful house guest) of Working Food, and Jared Zystro of the Organic Seed Alliance, just to name a few.
One of the most exciting workshops was right up my alley (or more specifically, the alley of the Dwarf Tomato Breeding project), discussing regional open pollinated plant breeding, was provided by Dr. Michael Mazourek, Professor of Plant Breeding at Cornell, and Brett Grosghal of Even’ Star Organic Farm in Maryland. Their talk, Breeding Crops for Resilience in the Face of Climate Change, faced head-on the challenge of plant breeders, gardeners and farmers to identify or create varieties that can handle rapidly changing conditions.
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As for “other things” - there really are an awful lot of them, a few major, most minor - but these are the things that will keep me busy for the foreseeable future.
Our impending move. We’ve lived in Raleigh for 28 years and it feels like time to go west - as in the Hendersonville NC region. We are de-cluttering, house hunting, getting our house ready for the market. That is a big project in itself, but it is underway. This will change things for sure - especially my future gardens, and spring seedling sales. It could be a few months or a year. Stay tuned…this is definitely a breaking story!
Seedlings growing in front of my sunny office window - these are my test plantings of my 5 new dwarf X indeterminate crosses - all are indeterminate, so all crosses took. I will blog about them soon.
The Dwarf Tomato Project. It lives on, and Victory Seed Company will be releasing over a dozen new ones very soon. Promising possibilities keep popping up, and I appear to have 5 new successful crosses to play with.
The book on the Dwarf Tomato Project. It exists in my brain and I need to carve out the time to shape it into a book. Yes, I know I’ve been talking about it for a few years, but it must happen, and happen pretty soon.
Fulfilling seed requests for both dwarf and heirloom tomatoes. I’ve received requests from lots of you and hope to get to stuffing seed packets and getting them into the mail over the next few weeks, into early next year.
My partial exodus from social media. Some of you may have noted that my personal Facebook page is no more, and I’ve vanished from Twitter. It is really a reaction to the times we live in, and the time I have available. It makes me very unhappy that tools used to bring people together are being used to divide us. I still have a Facebook book page (but can’t view or update it - my daughter Sara does that for me), as well as a private Dwarf Tomato Project page that I am also unable to access. I think those will soon vanish as well, but it is something I’m yet to be certain of. This leaves Instagram, and I am trying to post interesting pics each day - find me @nctomatoman . Aside from that, my primary means of communicating outward will be this blog and newsletters.
That’s quite a few “other things”. Hopefully this will give a sense of the things keeping me busy (very busy!), happy, and also a few things I continue to grapple with.
Marlin and Koda at rapt attention playing the morning “treat game” with Sue