The Tomato Tsar

Well the seeds arrived today just in time for the weekend. Got quite a good mix of things I can plant over the next few months.

• 'creamgold' onion - a variety that has been around for a long time. These will be going in this weekend
• Chioggia Beetroot - concentric circles of pink and white flesh characterise this variety. John the tomato afficianado told me today that Chioggia is a town in Italy on the Adriatic. Yummy beetroots Rae :-)
  
• 'ruby' brussel sprouts - this is just for Rae. As some of you will be aware, despite not liking tomatoes or beetroots I have started eating and enjoying them over the last few years. I'm going to give brussel sprouts another go and these are a reddish coloured variety. October planting.
  
• 'Magic bean' mix - a mix of 5 different bean varieties. All suitable for drying and storing for winter soups and the like. varieties all very different colours. Just goes to show, if you make it look like a peacock I'll buy it. beans go in the ground in October.
  
• 'honey and cream' corn - this is one of those old varieties with the yellow and white kernals on the same cob. supposed to be very sweet. (october planting)
• stringless celery (september planting)
• carrot heirloom mix - this is a mix of several different heirloom carrot strains including white, yellow and purple carrot varieties. should be a bit of fun too. purple carrots is a little freaky hehe. (september planting)
  
• mini cabbages (august planting)
• French Breakfast Radish - they are sort of longish white radishes (september planting)
• Some strawberry seeds
• Pink Eye seed potatoes - we all know what they are (well most of you do). potatoes can go in the ground in august so I'll keep them in a nice warm place until they start to sprout a bit and then in they go! ooo lovely pink eye new potatoes - I can barely wait!

Back to John the Tomato Tsar. I called John today to talk to him about tomatoes. He told me not to buy any seeds because he has the seeds of 350 varieties of tomatoes. Yep that's not a typo 3-5-0. He has a whole network of people for whom he raises tomato seedlings and then distributes them when the weather is right for them to plant out. Thats right, he raises the plants and the gives them to you after the last frost. All he asks is that you save some seeds for him from the plants you grow to go back into his seed store. He was very keen to give me 50 or 60 plants! I am keen on tomatoes suited to making sauce and pasta sauces for preserving and also for drying and storing in oil. He seemed quite pleased about this because most people only want the eating varieties, so I can help him by planting out a whole lot of the sort of varieties that other people don't want. I have to keep them labelled though (he gives you the labels too) so that you can correctly label the seeds to save. He also gives you the seed saving instructions! Looking forward to a huge bed of different types of tomatoes (I'm expecting custodial duties over about 30+ varieties!).