urbantomato: February 2012

Seedy Sunday 2012 - less than two weeks away!

Peterborough's Annual Seed Exchange

Seedy Sunday

Sunday March 11th 2-5pm

George St. United Church

FREE.

Seedy Sunday is a great place to get inspired for Spring. Come out and get the knowledge, tools and resources you need to get growing this season. There will be vendors selling a huge variety of heirloom seeds, local community offering resources, advice and information, as well as a seed exchange area where participants can trade seeds or purchase some for a donation. The PCGN will be hosting informative garden related workshops.

For more information go to http://urbantomato.blogspot.com or contact urbantomato@gmail.com

Join the Facebook event

Packing seeds & making buttons

Spending lots of time in my home office making buttons & packaging seeds getting ready for seed exchange and market season:

Buttons lining up

My old 8-track box is filling right up with packaged seeds!

packing my striped cavern seeds

My tomato seed collection

I have been collecting tomato seeds for over six years! wow what fun it has been. this is my chronological collection. starting in the front with some seeds given to me, then my 2006 & 2007 collections in the tines, 2008 small box, 2009 box with red flowers, 2010 bigger box next to that, and the big box at the back is my 2011 tomato seed collection. Love that the containers & the collections gets bigger & bigger each year!!

I will be donating lots to seed exchanges around the provinces soon

I need an antique post-office box or library card catalouge to hold them all

My seed bank

At this time of the year, I take my seeds out of the various cabinets they are stored in throughout my house, and go through them to determine what I should donate to seed exchanges, what should be planted, and of course package some to sell

Of course, I couldn't resist photographing my collection

*For the record, you shouldn't keep your seeds this close to a radiator, or out in a sunny room, i did this just for organizing purposes

Seedy Sunday Workshops

Just announced: Workshop topic for Seedy Sunday!

Planning your Garden for the Season:

How to Maximize your Space & Optimize Your Yield

with Peggy Baillie ~ local gardening guru

Want to make the most of your space, find solutions to challenges or gain tools for your garden? Come to the Garden Planning Workshop at 2:30pm at Peterborough Seedy Sunday to discover ways to make your garden the most productive. The following topics will be discussed: Seed starting, square foot gardening/space planning, succession planning and season extension. Peggy will also provide some tools to make your planning that much easier.

Come to discover how to make your garden suit your needs.

urbantomato

Awesome!! Thanks to my very talented friend Jacob Rolfe for this!

Tomato Photo Shoot!

Once the tomatoes were picked, we brought them home, and they got to star in their own photo shoot in all their delicious diverse glory. These shots are stills from an upcoming film by Brian Mitolo. Here I am describing each of the varieties grown

ahh the bounty of the many varieties collected

Purple Cherokee - looks at those gorgeous stripes

Green Zebra

Costoluto Genovese in my wonderfully dirty hands

Moonglow!

Black Russian- I can almost taste their smokey deliciousness when i gaze at this shot

Green Grape

Black Plum - look at all of them!

Sweet Angora - hard not to eat these little cherry tomatoes right out of my hand when i was doing this shoot

Black cherry - again resisting the urge to snack

Yellow Pear

Stupice

Striped Cavern

Hartman's Gooseberry

Red Fig

Memories of Harvest Season

I would like to thank Brian Mitolo for his amazing shots of me harvesting & describing my many tomato varieties. These shots make me really happy, and remind me of being out at the farm warm, and the joy I feel when my hands are covered in dirt & I am caressing my beautiful tomatoes. I will break it the shots up into a few blog posts. First, picking ....