Tomatoes and Peppers

wooly kate tomatoes are fuzzy. the leaves of the plants are very fuzzy, covered in small hairs, tomentose even. exploring the extreme ranges of characteristics in tomato species and cultivars is fun.

sun sugar xl tomatoes, I've been saving seed and growing them for about ten years now. the flavour is distinct in these orange cherry tomatoes, sweeter and fruitier than the average tomato. the xl size come up through some variation, it's almost stable. I've started to keep 2 lines, one round and one egg shaped. this is a larger sun sugar with the same sweetness / flavour / color and the smaller typical ones. thinking it would be fun to cross the flavour with some more colorful ones or with other shapes.

phil's one tomato, like godzilla it has some Reisetomate in it's parentage, the travelers tomato, just break off chunks to snack on. it's like a fusion of cherry tomatoes.

manitoba tomato.. cool to find one named after our province, it's a medium sized and bright red, good size to throw in a salad

godzilla tomatoes easily break apart into lobes. they have the most unusual tomato shape

couple of large bicolour tomatoes, northern lights, and last ones are pineapple

queen of the night tomato, such cool colors. they were the blackest of all our high anthocyanin tomatoes at harvest.

trying this out, drying peppers for seed extraction in halves. less work, usually I'll take out the seeds and dry the peppers / just eat them, seeing how well we can combine steps

growing tomatoes in isolation, this method has some frost protection benefits, a few nights now I've cover then in burlap and run a sprinkler.. -2C / 28F no problem under some cover. our weather is literally 29C with chance of frost this week. you can see some ripe tomatoes on the vine, a good result for our short 100 day frost free season. why are they isolated? for seed, all of these plants supply our seed shop, so to keep cross pollination to zero we isolate from pollinators. the plants are starting to grow into each other, but it's fine the only fruit we're going to collect set weeks ago, I could even take the cover off for this last week in the home stretch before harvest if it wasn't such a handy frost cover

frost blankets, happened to have about 100 burlap coffee sacks ready. will know later today how much frost damage we got, maybe the tomatoes were fine. we can get 3 more weeks of nice weather, but forecast is another hard frost tonight.

feels like first day of fall when we get a hard frost. from 2am-8:30, graph is the end photo. as a precaution, burlap and sprinklers over the tomatoes will see if they made it

godzilla the only tomato you can just pull apart to eat. #godzillatomato

carbon, chocolate cherry, garden peach. Grew a few tomatoes with high anthocyanin, still looking for the darkest ones. garden peach is fuzzy, surprised that trait isn’t in more of them, should protect the fruit right?

czech black, pasilla bajio, jimmy nardello, bananarama, super chilli #peppers

green giant, northern lights, dixie golden giant, bulls heart. we grew fifty kinds of heirloom tomatoes in our seed garden this year.

first hard frost, wonder if my tomatoes under the sprinkler survived. colder than the forecast. these bluetooth thermometers are so cool to see the graph, below freezing for a few hours.

tomato isolation experiment. who posts a five minute video to instagram, obviously longer than anyone’s attention span on here right?

thirty degrees (80F) with a chance of frost describes our spring and fall some years. early september frost is real here, often followed by weeks of nice weather. last night was 1 degree above freezing, so I ran a sprinkler all night over our tomato and pepper garden. survived, and now in the clear for a bit. Here in southern Manitoba we often have frost early june in the same way, making for 90-100 days frost free.. but really except for a few nights the season is a couple weeks longer on each end.

trying some tomato crosses. maybe a bit late in the year, we usually get some frost in the first half of September. trying some black tomato like carbon x godzilla. here are some green godzilla, just a crazy lumpy ball, so cool.

these little guys, sun sugar tomato.. they’re my favorite. I’ve been saving seeds from these for almost ten years, occasionally a plant will have red fruit but they’re at least 90% true to type. I planted several groups of them this year from a few generations, always looking for those 3/4” bright orange super tasty ones. I’ve also separated a line of larger ones that I call sun sugar xl, same taste just 1.25” or so

3 days into germ testing our fushimi pepper seeds, looking good I thought they would take a couple weeks. do fresh pepper seeds germinate faster? #seedsaving

fish peppers ripening in the greenhouse. 5000- 30,000 scoville make them up to 4x hotter than jalapeno #fishpepper #hotpeppers

blueberries tomato. still figuring out the high anthocyanin varieties, when these were unripe they were deep purple more like the name suggests. picked a few weeks ago these ones are super ripe now and about half red.

Pepperoncini, italian chilli peppers. sweet with mild heat 100-500 scoville #peppers

sweet cherry peppers. grown with isolation bags for seed, also we get to eat them. flavour? starts like a good red bell pepper with a slight cherry after taste that’s distinct, no heat in these ones. I bet they’re good in a salad. #seedsaving #peppers

sun sugar xl, a larger sunsugar tomato at about 1.25”. I’m about five-six years into saving the seeds and these larger ones showed up in the second year. tastes the same as the smaller sunsugar, which have a reputation for being tasty.

how are heirloom tomatoes in season the most expensive thing in the whole produce section at safeway? our food supply chain is messed.