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Hello from way up north!

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    Hello from way up north!

    Hello all!

    I've been gardening all my life, doing tomato trials for roughly twenty years in mostly rental apartments and temporary back lots. A couple years ago I moved to northern British Columbia, in Canada, where I'm now on 7 acres. The trade-off is, of course, a very short, cool outdoor season (90 days, 23C daytime and 10C nighttimes or so) and a very long indoor season. I started playing with bigger tomato trials up here to find anything that would ripen without a greenhouse and still taste decent. That led to promiscuous tomatoes, which led to manual crosses and the beginnings of breeding, which led to hydroponically growing F1s out over the winter, which led to micro tomatoes overwinter so I can actually eat tomatoes year round, which led to this forum on Diane's recommendation from the OSSI forums.

    I'm a huge fan of silvery fir tree, flavours of green-when-ripe tomatoes and what I knew as black tomatoes and are now brown (?) with the arrival of anthocyanin on the scene. I have tracked down Lucinda, which I'm growing for the first time this year and seems to be a big plant with much later flowering habit than its silvery fir tree parent, and Fat Frog which I don't find to be enormously productive.

    I'm also a big fan of the Karen Olivier tomatoes Taiga and KARMA miracle, and I'm going to try making some crosses using those and whatever micros are to hand (I've already got some F1 seeds of her Sweet Baby Jade x Hardin's Mini and the reciprocal, and whatever "heirloom cherry" micro comes with the aerogarden x Sweet Baby Jade, but honestly sweet baby jade isn't as nice as Taiga and KARMA miracle, it's just dwarf, so it seemed like a reasonable place to start).

    I've grown out a handful of minis to compare for taste and productivity and quite enjoyed the flavour of Moment and the productivity of Pygmy but could really use more information about minis generally.

    Because my own inroads into my mini project are so new and I'm still waiting on ripening F1 seeds and F1 growouts, I'm interested in getting my hands on seeds further along the process for this winter where I might be able to find something interesting or tasty from a big batch of minis or small dwarfs, where I can ruthlessly cull anything without carrot leaf foliage or that gets past 12" without forming some flower clusters, and just generally where I can revel in observation and diversity.

    This has got quite long and got off in the weeds a little bit, but I guess the long and short is: hi, I'm Greenie, I like tomatoes.

    #2
    Hello there, nice to meet you and welcome to the forum! I see you have already put in a request for the project. I've been a bad project manager this year and haven't been checking on the registrations. I will review yours and look to get you some seed sent out this week!

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      #3
      Oh yay, hi! How exciting! Thank you!

      The garden is always a little more interesting than the internet for me. I'd never catch up on paperwork if it wasn't for winter here.

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