Tag Archives: Heirloom Tomatos

Harvest!

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Harvest is in full swing. To kick it off Jim and I attended our CSA’s (Community Shared Agriculture) annual harvest party. We’ve been CSA members of Kawartha Ecological Growers for three years now and this is the second time we’ve made it out to the farm(s) for their annual party. The KEG Harvest Party brought together many of the people from my food community, including a number of the vendors from my local farmers’ market, the Apple Tree Market. We were treated to a potluck, tomato tasting, free camping, a wild light show from nature (that didn’t turn into rain until after we went to bed), and a samba band around a giant campfire – Samba Elegua. We woke up to hot chocolate from ChocoSol and handmade tortillas for breakfast topped with tomatoes and jalapeños.

But this only marked the start of the harvest season for us. We brought home a bushel of heirloom tomatoes from the farm to preserve and after a few hours had jars of yellow, green, orange and red tomatoes. Their seeds have also been saved for next year. We have since canned another bushel of roma tomatoes, including our annual batch of ketchup. Still on deck are plans for salsa, pickled roasted red peppers, a batch of pumpkin beer, and saving a few more tomato seeds, enough to keep us busy to the more official harvest party: Thanksgiving. With all this on the go the past couple of weeks I’ve slacked on my Gumboot writing duties and decided instead to share a few pictures.

In Pursuit of Infinite Tomatoes, Part 2

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On the previous episode of In Pursuit of Infinite Tomatoes the equation for infinite tomatoes was introduced [(Year Round Tomato Supply) + (Annual Replication of Favourite Tomatoes) = Infinite Tomatoes], strategies to have a year-round supply of local, BPA-free tomatoes were presented (including freezing, drying and canning), and a case was made how preserving your own food can help build community. Now for the exciting conclusion.

I love trying all kinds of tomatoes. Red, green, yellow, orange, pink, white, purple, black – large, medium, small, cherry, paste – etc. And I often find ones that I particularly like for their shape, colour, texture, and of course, flavour. And over the past few years I’ve started saving the seeds of some of my favourites to plant the following spring. It means that I don’t have to pay the high price for seeds, I get a wide diversity and the seedling I grow are shared with friends and colleagues.

Saving tomato seeds is actually quite easy. The hardest part is making sure that you’ve picked the right tomato. It is better to choose an heirloom variety of tomato. The tomatoes you find in the grocery store or the plants you get at garden centres are usually hybrids. They were specifically cross bred for one good year and won’t give you a good result in years that follow (which isn’t very good for the infinite tomato). Heirlooms however have had their seeds saved for generations and tomatoes usually self pollinate so you’ll often get what you expect.

  1. Get a jar and squeeze the seeds and tomato juice into it.
  2. Top the jar with a cloth/paper towel and secure it with an elastic band. This will help prevent fruit flies.
  3. Eat the remaining tomato.
  4. Let the jar sit for a day or two until it develops a scum on the top. Fresh tomatoes have a growth inhibitor so seeds won’t germinate too early so this fermentation process is needed so the seed can germinate.
  5. Rinse the seeds by topping the jar up with fresh water and slowly pouring most of it out. The scum will float to the top and the seeds will sink to the bottom. Repeat until the seeds are clean in the bottom of the jar.
  6. Spread the seeds out to dry on a cloth, paper towel or paper for a couple of days, spreading them out so they aren’t touching each other.
  7. Store the seeds in an envelope in a cool and dry place until February, when it is time to start planting!

Starting to save and plant seeds is up there with the most important things that have happened in human history. For about 99% percent of the 2 million years or so that we’ve been around we were hunters and gatherers living in small mobile groups. Agriculture, both in sowing seeds and animal husbandry, marked one of our biggest transitions, between 12,000 and 5000 BC. We started to settle in one place and cities emerged, we started specializing and diversifying our skills, and powerful religious or political elites rose and fell (for more detail see the first few chapters of Clive Ponting’s “A Green History of the World: The Environment and the Collapse of Great Civilizations.”) It marked an important beginning for communities as we now know them.

Fast forward 7000 years and our population has grown from between 2 and 20 million people in 8,000 BC to over 6 billion now. Up until quite recently, farmers and gardeners saving their own seeds was still common practice. But now, mega corporations like Monsanto are changing this by requiring farmers to buy new seed from them every year and making saving their seeds illegal. Through breeding and genetic modifications, seeds are becoming intellectual property – like Roundup Ready corn – that are patented and sold. The diversity that varried across regions and cultures is disappearing. The simple act of growers saving their own seeds, which has sustained us for millenniums, is no longer practiced in most conventional agriculture.

In Canada we have an amazing organization called Seeds of Diversity. Their mission is to conserve, document and use “public-domain non-hybrid plants of Canadian significance.” They grow, propagate and distribute 1900 varieties of vegetables, fruit, grains, flowers and herbs. Basically they are a gene bank. A few years ago I gave them seeds that my family has been growing for generations – the Prince Albert potato and “Burns Beans” (one of the secret ingredients I used in the Weddingmania rehearsal dinner chilli cook-off). They even have the Canadian Tomato Project. By late winter and early spring they host a series of over 75 events all over the country called “Seedy Saturday” (or “Seedy Sunday”), where heirloom seeds are sold and exchanged. (The one in Toronto also has lots to do for non-gardeners like hands on workshops, great networking with food security groups, and delicious food.)

Grassroots communities like Seeds of Diverity and events like Seedy Saturdays not only make my ongoing pursuit of infinite tomatoes significantly more exiciting, but they are making sure that an important part of our heritage is preserved and our food system will continue to have genetic diversity available to help us adapt to future changes in our climate.

Urban Tomatoes

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My engagement with urban agriculture started with a gift to my husband Jim a few months before we moved to Toronto.  A close friend gave him eight small yellow envelops of seeds as a birthday present.  The uneven typing  on the envelopes read “White Queen,” “Tigerella,” “Lime Salad,” “Purple Cherokee,” “Yellow Pear,” “Black Seaman,” “Peasant’s Paste,” and “Druzba.”  They were heirloom tomato seeds from a Seed Sanctuary in Kingston, Ontario.

The following February we bought a seed starting tray, potting soil and a cheap grow light and planted a full tray of seeds.  The thought of growing tomatoes from seed, especially in a basement apartment with a north facing window, seemed like we were setting ourselves up for failure.  Up until this point the only tomato plants in my life had come from garden centres.  Every June, my parents would take us to buy tomato seedlings from warm, humid greenhouses scented with chemical fertilizers.  And now here we were starting tomato seeds in February, months before the potential plants would head outside in what seemed to be a totally inhospitable environment for heat and sun-loving tomatoes.

I was wrong about the tomatoes.  We ended up with over 40 healthy seedlings when it came time to transplant them to larger pots.  And then there was the question of where to put them.  The patch of grass outside our apartment window was ours to use but our landlord was insistent that we were only allowed to plant in pots.  It could handle a few plants, but what about the rest?  The need to find a place for our tomatoes led us to find Maloca Community Garden at York University, where Jim and I were both studying.  The initial e-mails sent to the garden were slow to be answered but in a short time we were showing up to regular community work days and had negotiated a plot for most of our tomatoes.  This was my introduction to community gardening and urban agriculture.

A lot has happened since that first introduction to growing food in the city.  That first year we invited a couple of on campus friends to help us out with our plot of tomatoes.  The tomatoes grew into a dense thicket (and were delicious).  That fall Jim and I were elected to the community garden’s steering committee and we spent the following season leading workdays, setting up a blog, fighting to get the garden on the campus map and trying to grow the “community” part of the garden in addition to the vegetables.  The third year we passed responsibilities of the garden over to a new steering committee but helped to get a new water tank and grew not only enough tomatoes for ourselves but also many for our communal plots.  That summer was when I started working in Markham, a large suburb north of Toronto, with a big part of what I’m focusing on related to local food and urban agriculture planning.

Community gardens and urban agriculture are moving into the mainstream.  And whether the trendiness of the 100 mile diet or the necessity caused by a global recession is the source of this current interest, there are a lot of reasons why our Canadian cities should be embracing community gardens and figuring out how agriculture can work in cities and suburbs.  Beyond the potential to reduce the carbon footprint of our food by growing and eating food we grow, there are other environmental benefits including reduced use of pesticides (most community gardens prohibit the use of all but the most natural pesticides), onsite management of organic waste through composting and much needed plant variety for our pollinators.  Plus community gardens can serve as great site for eco education and with a bit of management can help beautify communities.  Beyond the environmental benefits, there are also social, cultural and economic benefits to community gardens, including healthy food and physical activity, improved community safety, access to culturally appropriate foods, welcoming public space, increased food knowledge, affordable program to maintain, and improved partnerships throughout the community.  And there are also a lot of ways that cities can support community gardens including supportive land use policies, financial support, public-private partnerships, technical assistance with site and design, management of programs, education and design.