Off The Vine Volume 1, Issue 1 front cover

First, Carolyn Male

After talking about this newsletter for a couple of years I’m delighted we’re able to send you the first issue. Craig and I are each writing a short description of where we’re coming from and where we’re going.

I’m writing this as I sit on the porch of the farmhouse where I was raised. As I look out over the fields I remember when I was a kid knocking Colorado Potato Beetles off the tomatoes into a can of kerosene. My father would get mad at me because I couldn’t bring myself to squash the orange eggs on the leaves; I still won’t do it unless I have gloves on. Valiant, Rutgers, Marglobe and Fireball are some of the tomato varieties I remember from childhood and we picked them in 3.4 bushel baskets (HEAVY!). My grandfather had purchased our farm in 1921 from the Shakers, a religious sect founded by Mother Ann Lee in Watervliet, NY, which is a few miles from our home. My family has lived here since the 1880’s and my widowed mother, age 80, still lives here but I live in an apartment a few miles away. Trust me, it works better than way. We raised all sorts of vegetables such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, peas, beans, etc., and huge peach orchards kept us busy in the Fall. My grandparents raised a lot of fruit, of which only a few clumps of renegade red raspberries survive. My grandmother had beautiful perennial flower gardens and I still have her single hollyhocks and various kinds of old fashioned peonies.

I have most of the summer to tend my gardens full time because I’m a college teacher. After graduating from Cornell I received my PhD in Microbiology from the U. of Rochester Medical School. For many years I taught medical students in Denver but in 1982 I moved back East to care for my elderly parents; my father died in 1985. I currently teach at a private college and teach anything and everything related to biology, although my own special expertise is in the area of human infectious disease.

Flowers will always be a prime love with me. I have extensive perennial and herb gardens and I fool around at hybridizing miniature roses and daylilies. I’m a charter member of the new American Dianthus Society; the Dianthus group includes pinks, carnations, and sweet Williams. And I also belong to the American Hemerocallis and Rose Societies.

The Creator/Creatress did not make me perfect. I’m organized but messy, and I file by pile. I’ve inherited arthritis from my mother and the extra 60 lbs on my 5’10” frame doesn’t help. On the other hand I don’t easily fade into the background. I’m 54 and single. I had two cat “kids” but both of them, age 16, died last year, one from heart disease and the other of kidney failure. I see an Irish Wolfhound in my future, along with more cats, but not until I retire to my anticipated log cabin in the woods. Of course, there will be gardens of all types, fruit orchards, and a swimming hole!

In the meantime I grow almost every kind of vegetable you can imagine, but I concentrate on heirloom tomatoes and to a lesser extent peppers. Although I haven’t counted lately, I must now have seed for about 600-800 varieties of tomatoes, of which I grow out about 100-130 (300-400 plants) each summer. I feel quite strongly about genetic biodiversity and preserving the genetic material of heirloom vegetables. With respect to tomatoes I am, quite frankly, fascinated by the diversity of shape, size, color and taste of the fruit and the various patterns of foliage. I’m absolutely shameless in pursuit of new heirloom varieties, especially from foreign students and faculty at the college where I teach.

I want to do everything I can to help preserve heirloom vegetables an educate the public about their virtues. I give talks and workshops locally but I see our “Off The Vine” as an important vehicle to teach a larger audience with respect to accomplishing these goals.

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Here’s Craig’s intro

Most of you that have been reading the blurbs under my name in the address section of the SSE Winter Yearbook have probably noticed that I always have some sort of “project” that I am planning. Those will all be updated in this introductory column; this newsletter is the first of my “project wish list“ that has made it off the ground! I must thank Carolyn for helping to motivate me in this regard, as I am quite good at procrastination...but, here we are, and this is a good time to give a little information about what I hope for this newsletter, why we are doing it, and some information that will tell you all a little about how I became involved with the SSE, and, especially, heirloom tomatoes.

First, I suppose I should provide a little background about myself (mostly because Carolyn asked me to!). I am 38 years old, married with two girls (Caitlin, 8, and Sara, 12), and am constantly having to reassure my family that I have not “lost it” when they see me planting 97 varieties of tomatoes in my garden, or appear excited about numerous cups of foul smelling, fermenting, fruit fly infested tomato pulp. My roots are in New England, as I grew up and did my undergraduate education in Rhode Island, and received my PhD.in chemistry from Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. We then spent a year in Seattle, which must be the best place to live anywhere...then reality set in, it was time to go to work, and that is how we got to Pennsylvania, and now North Carolina. When I am not gardening, I am a chemist, first at SmithKline, now at Glaxo pharmaceuticals. It certainly pays the bills, but chemistry is not the first thing that passes through my mind when I think of relaxation and happiness...

My love for gardening was “planted” (forgive the pun...) as a young child, maybe 6 years old or so, during the hours I spent with my grandfather in his huge garden. I recall seeing amazing dahlias, strawberries, sweet peas, squash, and, of course, tomatoes. In fact, I hated tomatoes until I had eaten the ones that he grew for us. My interest in gardening became dormant for many years as school took its toll on my time and attention. It was not until graduate school and marriage to Sue that we decided that it would be fun to grow our own vegetables, and we had several beautiful gardens in a community plot in the early 1980’s.

Being a scientist, I am naturally curious, and was always interested in trying lots of varieties of everything. Trips to the local nursery were frustrating, however, as all one finds there are plants of the “top ten” or so, and growing Better Boy hybrid or Roma was becoming boring. Ordering seeds from catalogs and starting everything ourselves was an improvement, but there was still a certain sameness about the experience. Then, my gardening life changed when I learned of the Seed Saver’s Exchange in 1986 from a gardening magazine. Everything has mushroomed from there, and now I find myself introducing many people and organizations each year to the joy of growing heirloom vegetables. I am sure that this story is very familiar to many of you, and you may have experienced similar things.

So, enough background. Oh, yes, I wanted to update you on my projects. First there is this newsletter, and here we are with that. I may write occasional articles for Bob Ambrose’s “Tomato Club” newsletter, which some of you may be familiar with. I continue to grow out new (to me) heirloom tomatoes each year, as well as some of my favorites which have held their own against new competition in the trials. And, I was asked to write a tomato book by a publisher, and am about to get started on that rather daunting but exciting project (I may be asking some of you for input for the book). There are other projects that are on the horizon, such as examining germination enhancement procedures, sorting out the tomato section of the SSE winter yearbook (looking for errors, synonymous varieties, etc.). Finally, my trip to the SSE campout this year was truly inspiring, and my efforts for genetic preservation are newly focused, and energized.

For my part, I will try to express my goals for this newsletter. First and foremost, I would like it to be a forum for all tomato enthusiasts in the SSE to share information and concerns with each other, whether it is a special growing technique, search for a lost variety, sharing of historical information, alert for a particularly delectable variety, or even concerns regarding the SSE in general. We will try to provide our own expertise and experience each time, but we will require more than just the input of two tomato gardeners. There may be some proposed projects that many of you would like to take part in. Who knows...this is the starting line, and it’s a race that goes on infinitely, so lets get started!

Welcome to all of you, and thanks for your interest. I hope that it will be informative, and fun!

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It was really nice to revisit Carolyn’s words about herself. It is as hard to read what I wrote there as it is to listen to myself on podcasts, or watch myself on video (cringe!!!!). But, for better or worse, there it is!