Want sneak peaks? Some neat recipes? I'm collaborating with Chef Signe Langford on a delicious book: Olives, Lemons & Figs. Find out how to use olives, lemons, and figs from fruit to root to shoot, including fig-wood smoked fare, fizzy lemon-leaf apéritifs, and lots more. Click here so you don't miss our updates.
***
We’re joined by tomato expert Craig LeHoullier to talk about the Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project, preserving seed varieties, and to find out what’s new in his garden.
LeHoullier, an avid seed saver with a passion for saving and sharing heirloom tomato varieties, says that his seed collection contains somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 seed packets.
The project began in 2004. LeHoullier was getting a lot of questions about compact varieties at his annual tomato-plant sale.
He explains that dwarf tomato varieties, which grow vertically at approximately half the rate of other indeterminate tomato varieties, already existed at the time. But these dwarf varieties were obscure and hard to find.
He teamed up with a friend in Australia to start breeding new dwarf tomato varieties. That initiative soon grew into an open source, volunteer-run, worldwide breeding project. The goal was to breed stable, open-pollinated, dwarf tomato varieties from which gardeners could save their own seed.
The project began releasing dwarf tomato varieties to seed companies in 2010.
By 2020, 135 varieties had been released.
***
- Join the 5,000+ gardeners in The Food Garden Gang who stay on top of home food-growing ideas with our weekly e-mail. We’re making the world a better place one garden at a time!
- Grab the free e-books: Small-Space Food-Gardening Hacks and Growing Figs in Cold Climates.
