Cultivating The Love Apple

I love Seed Savers (http://www.seedsavers.org). But I hate tomato politics. First the love:

Seed Savers is an organization whose mission is to save the genetic diversity of plants. They do this by collecting seeds of different plants, but more importantly, they encourage people to grow the plants. Seeds locked in a vault somewhere will eventually go bad. They need to be planted and have their seeds collected to remain viable. Seed Savers does have a nice glossy catalog where you can purchase some interesting stuff directly from them, which I did this year and last year. But their power really is the exchange catalog. Every fall they query their membership about what they can offer. And every spring they publish the Exchange catalog with the listings. I’d heard that the catalog was pretty big, but I had no idea. Thousands of tomatoes! Hundreds of listers. Some with just a few types of seed and some with hundreds of kinds. 1500 pages of pure text listings. The tomato section was the largest at 300-400 pages. Here’s some picture:

Yep, that section I’m pinching is just the tomatoes. I was blown away. I couldn’t make a decision, so I bought most of my seeds from the regular catalogs. I did finally buy 5 mostly mainstream varieties from a local exchanger who had around 600 different tomato types listed. He threw in some bonus seeds for me, too. Next year I’m going to offer some seeds, not just because you get better prices if you offer them. I have some family bean seeds that my great-granny brought over from the old country that I’m going to offer for exchange. I have no idea if they are the same as what’s already offered, but it doesn’t really matter. I get to name them after my granny. That’s cool.

Now the hate:

One of the founders of Seed Savers was forced out last year. He didn’t go gracefully and didn’t accept their take-this-money-and-shut-up package. Instead he sent a letter to all the members pleading his case. And the post about it on gardenweb broke down into pro= and anti- sides in no time. I have no idea of the details of any of this. But I’d like them all to just shut up and get back to finding cool seeds for me to grow.

Also, I’ve been looking for a website to keep track of my seedlings and be in more of a gardening community, like Vicki does with ravelry.com. I posted in gardenweb.com asking people what their favorite other gardening websites are. I got two quick replies and then my post was deleted. Apparently gardenweb.com does not acknowledge the existence of other gardening sites and stomps on any mention of them. What the hell?

The two replies I received referenced some other politics where some people got ejected from some other posting forums and created their own and now don’t like some other people from the original board. Can’t we just all get together and talk about which tomato is the tastiest and which will grown the best in sandy soil? I guess the Internet is the Internet whether it’s talking about tomatoes or elections or some silly television show.

On the upside, I made a HUGE batch of beefy tomato soup this weekend. After 3-4 gallons of frozen tomato parts from last year, a huge pile of veggies, 2 bulbs of garlic, and a few cubed sirloin steaks, I got about 4 gallons of soup. Than God for our huge basement freezer. And I still have about 3 gallon bags of tomatoes from last season. Any recipe sugestions? I’d trade soup for them!

Mike

P.S. More garden updates coming soon!

This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 9:34 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.