From away to garden.com and Robinhood Radio.com, this is Away to Garden with Margaret Roach. You're a weekly invitation to dig in and grow. Organic seed farmer and breeder Don Tipping of Siskiew seeds in Oregon is here for that colorful, warming conversation. After trialing 55 tomato varieties last season Don Don has some goodies to recommend and some advice on growing your best tomatoes ever, including ones that actually store well long after harvest. Yes, storage tomatoes. So more in a moment, but first these messages. Underwriting support for a way to garden provided by color blends wholesale flower bulbs. third-generation bulb company offering top-sized flower bulbs directly to landscape professionals and ambitious residential gardeners on the web colorblends.com and by high-mohing seeds, Wolcott Vermont professional quality vegetable, flower, and herbal seeds that are 100% organic and non-GMO project verified. On the web, highmoingseeds.com and by Whiteflower Farm offering a wide range of carefully selected and expertly grown garden plants. On the web, whiteflower farm.com. Don Tipping Founded Siski U Seeds a family run farm-based organic seed company in 1997.

Siski U is a farm with a view situated at 2000 feet of elevation in the Siski U mountains of Southwest Oregon and features something like a thousand varieties of vegetables, herbs, and flowers in its collection. I'm so glad to welcome him back to the show today. Hi Don, how are you? I bet it's not one degree there.

No, good morning.

We have a typical high pressure system in January of warm sunny days. It's been getting in the upper 50s and a little frosty at night. You're trying to make me jealous, are you? Oh my goodness. Anyway, I think the last time we chatted, it was about another sort of summary, hot-colored passion of your zinnias. So today's topic is kind of like that, you know, tomatoes and you did trials last summer at the farm of like 55 varieties, as I mentioned in the introduction that I had read about and I kept meaning to get in touch with you. And so here we are. What was the goal of the trials? Why did you do that? Well, basically every year on the farm, I try and pick a few species that I'm going to really dive deep into and learn more about because I think we can, there's always new varieties that we haven't grown or people are have enthusiasm for new crops. So this year it was tomatoes because I have a friend and colleague who's been doing some tomato breeding and recently I stumbled across the whole subcategory of storage tomatoes. So I was wanting to grow a whole bunch next to one another and learn more data because I find

Being a farm based seed company the more research and development work I can do is really valuable because oftentimes when I'm doing catalog writing I'll go to many other seed companies websites and I'll notice that many of them use the same exact word for word description which means they don't really know they're just copying, pasting. But I'm able to speak from my own personal experience. Right. And speaking of that sort of that boilerplate, you know, copy paste kind of thing, genetically speaking or whatever, I always say, and again, as a lay person, you know, I always say a Brandywine isn't a brandy wine, isn't a brandy wine, meaning in my non-professional way of saying that the genetics of the seed in the brandy wine packets that I could order from those 20 different seed catalogues that have a copy and paste at same definition is not the same unless it came from the same source of seed, right? So there's so much potential variability, so much genetic potential expression and adapt to all these adaptations that can happen. I mean, it's so exciting and that's the miracle of seed, you know? So like, I don't want that cut and paste thing. I want your first hand one and I want them them to get my first hand one, right? Yeah. Well, you know, a little figure I like to bring up from India, from the work of Vandana Shiva, as she talks about, before the Green Revolution, there were over 30,000 varieties of rice there. And, you know, if you were able to look at them all growing, many of them probably look really similar, but seeds do have memory. And if you keep growing them season after season in the same place under the same growing conditions, they'll do better every year, a little bit better in that area. Whereas most seed companies are just buying from the international wholesale market and it's not possible to have that level of specialization. This is what globalization has brought the world. Right. So it's availability to all, but it's availability from the same source, which is one strain, so to speak. one set of genetics that's adapted to those commercial fields in who knows where, and it's usually a place that's nothing like Rai Garden. And the techniques used, it's probably not, a lot of times it's not organically, man, and you know, all these kinds of things. So. Yeah, well, and you brought up Brandywine, that's one of the, well, actually two of varieties that we trialed was our strain of Brandywine that we've been growing and saving seed up for years and then one from my friend Steve Peters at C. Revolution now that he calls California Brandywine because they've been tweaking it and selecting for production on the central coast of California. Right. So, you know, technically the same thing, but one has learned to adapt to a coastal California climate, whereas I'm in the mountains of Oregon. Yeah. And again, it's just infinitely exciting, you know, the potential for these living creatures to express themselves, you know, in these intimately distinctive ways, I think. So that's why I love what I love about seed. I mean, one of the many things. So you had curiosity, you had curiosity about varieties, you didn't know, you had curiosity about comparing his brandy wine to your brandy wine, those kinds of things about the storage tomato. So what in the world is the storage tomato? I mean, that just cracked me up when I saw that in here. I mean, I sort of had heard of it, but I didn't really know. And do you actually have tomatoes and storage in January right now? Yeah. Well, kind of to where this story begins, at least for me,

as years ago, there was a tomato variety called Long Keeper.

And it's still out there.

And it's a round red, nothing special, like two to two

and a quarter inch diameter, red slice

or without exceptional flavor.

But if you pick it slightly underripe, like not green, but let's say orange, it'll for a long time. But it's not really exciting, and what really grabbed me with the Italian and Spanish and Catellone storage tomatoes was, I was really introduced to it through Lane Selman, who founded the Culinary Breeders Network and has done a lot to champion the unsung heroes of the vegetable world like we're doing. Yes. So I actually first saw it in pictures, and she and an artist do some, you know, pen and ink work of these clusters of tomatoes. So it looks like maybe a hundred cherry tomato sized things. I'll cluster together like a bunch of grapes hanging up. And then finally at one of these events, they had a table with the dry land farming collective that sprouted out of Oregon State University of two varieties. One was a red, a variety, and a, called Anarita, and another was a yellow one called Pinolo Gialo, which is basically yellow tomato. And so I actually bought a couple baskets of each of those. And he can do seed saving just because tomato generally don't cross from those. And then I also got some from a colleague who has a seed company in Spain But they're actually in the catch alone region so they see themselves distinct So I've I think five varieties from there And so we grew them all this year and I actually grew them last year and But I didn't manage to do a storage trial so at home, I have bunches of them hanging my kitchen. And every, you know, their story pretty well. I'm learning when you have to pick them. If you pick them totally ripe, some of them will rot. And they definitely, the ripe ones in my kitchen became fruit-flight magnets. So I learned that's not the way to do it. You actually want to keep a more in a root cellar, you know, a cooler garage or some backroom that you're not heating in your house. Okay. Yeah. Wow. I mean, it's pretty exciting because we gardeners, you know, everyone has grown a tomato properly, who's gardened, right? So we think think we know it about, oh, there's cherry tomatoes, there's beef, tomatoes, there's this, there's that. But this is something, there's paste tomatoes, whatever. But this is something that's kind of different. And if handled correctly, if timed right and managed correctly and put in the right place, it could mean the flavor of fresh tomato into a time of year when we don't have it. And that's pretty exciting stuff for cooking, I think, especially. Yeah, exactly. Because anyone who's gardening, we have huge abundance in August, September, and... Oh, boy, do we? Yeah. But eventually we get tired of it. But this time of year, having fresh tomatoes is really great. Yeah. So that, and it just, I think the care of it, I've really enjoyed that part because you clip little, the tresses of tomatoes, and then use twine or string or something to tie them in bunches. To me, I love the look of a gardener's kitchen where there's baskets of dried herbs and all the things that you're storing, onions and garlic or braids of onions and garlic. This just adds to that aesthetic and then when you're cooking

it's right there in front of your face you're like oh I'll add some fresh tomatoes to this whereas that's a very different relationship than a can or a jar on a shelf and a pantry which is still food but it's not as the tactile nature of it is something that is really I think a living pantry.

I mean, you mean, yeah.

Yeah, it's beautiful.

So there was something else that caught my attention

in the, and I wanna talk about some of your favorites

and some of the sort of winners, quote unquote, and so forth.

But there was something else besides the storage tomato

mentions in your report that I read of the trials. There was mention of... There was sun gold, but it wasn't just sun gold, which of course is this fabulously popular yellow cherry that has this great flavor, but it was California sun gold. And it was... there was mention of dehybridizing, the process of dehybridizing. And I wondered if you could tell us a little bit, they can anecdote about what is California's sun gold and what is dehydrhodizing mean? What was that in the trials? Yeah, so I think first just a very broad brushstroke definition of what a commercial F1 hybrid is, is usually thegeny of two in bread lines. So the breeder or the company maintaining it has these two different varieties, we'll call them variety A and variety B, and they look pretty much the same, but then when they cross them you get what's called hetero-rosis, and it's what hybrid vigor is, and then that's the F1, which stands for first fillial generations. Every time they produce seed, they have to do that cross. So they're actually maintaining three different seed lines. My friend Andrew Still, who I believe you've had on yours. Oh, of course. From adaptive seeds, he recently was on a podcast. And he was theorizing that Sun Gold has been one of these ones that for a lot of us, it's, we haven't been able to dehybridize. I know in my efforts, when I just saved seed from Sungold's, the resulting variety was never as productive or as flavorful. So he was thinking that maybe it has more than two parent lines, maybe it's multiples. And so the level of genetic disintegration, this is why generally people don't save seed from hybrids. You get what's called genetic disintegration by about the third or fourth generation. So like what we say in very simple terms, it doesn't come true. The seed of a hybrid doesn't come true. It doesn't look like the parent plant the next time around. Yeah, like one of my mentors, Dr. Alan Capular, went by the name mushroom. He, you can never technically dehydrate something because you can't remove the cross, but you can stabilize a hybrid. So he did this with early girl, which is a very popular hybrid market slicer tomato. And out of that, a beef steak, aroma, and a cherry came out of it. So it's progeny. It had all of those back in its ancestral lines. This is the proverbial black sheep kind of thing. So with sun gold, we've had a variety that I just called Wally's gold after my eldest son years ago. He wouldn't eat normal tomatoes but he'd eat sun gold. So we saved seed from it. But it's never been that great of a variety to be honest. So I have another one called Newmex Sundog that's from a grower in New Mexico, hence the name Newmex. And then the cowl sun gold, which I got from Steve Peters and his colleague Conti, who had been in the commercial tomato breeding world for a long time, that one in our trials had the flavor of the sungled hybrid and the productivity. So that's going to be the one that we're, I'm dropping the other two. And this is the value of hybrids. It was why I have three different varieties that are all fairly similar if one is superior. And you don't know if something is superior until you grow it. And you have to grow more than one plant because maybe that one plant was on where in an order to amount of compost went down or something like that. Right. We were growing at least 15 plants of each of these varieties. So this 55 variety trial was a quarter acre tomatoes. It was quite a... As I was transplanting that out and having to make all the labels and maps and like let it dig it into. But we really like that variety. So Cal Sun Gold it's going to be our new... That's great. Right. And so that's a little bit of story of this dehydridizing idea, the idea that you can now save seed from, you know, a new seed company. So there's that. And yeah, it's very interesting to me to see that. So just let's shout out a couple of maybe some old standbys that were proved to be winners again in the trials. And a few maybe a couple of other new names that you want to learn us to besides the storage one and so forth that you've told us about. Any other? Yeah. That you wouldn't be without. So in any time you do a trial, you need something to establish your baseline, something you're actually familiar with. So for myself, one of my favorite slicers for many years has been Cherokee Purple. Just as a, you know, if I could only grow one slicer tomato for the rest of my life, I'd be totally fine with that. It's not the earliest one. So I grew that in a few other just varieties that I already knew that I liked them. Another one was a Greek heirloom called Thessaloniki. That's just a good baseline for a red slicer with flavor. And then we had a couple yellow ones because they're different categories. So I had yellow brandy wine and Valencia as a heirloom type and more just a yellow-orne slicer. So, then I could compare a new variety that I'd never seen before if it is as productive as those, as early or later, or also the flavor, which is highly subjective. And thankfully, I was able to participate in a couple public events to do tomato tasting. So even though I grew 55 varieties, once I was into the harvest, some of the clear winners began to emerge. So I went to an event called Tomato Fest, up in Portland where there were about 800 people. They closed down a city block and we all had booths and they're all kind of activities and tattoos know tattoos like those temporary tattoos for kids and artwork about tomato so I had my favorite two dozen varieties that I'd cut up and had with toothpicks for people to samples and then a scoring chart so it was interesting to see what people liked and it was pretty consistent so a number of the the ones, you know, so there's appearance of something is very engaging with appearance. I think we're, we're gonna want to like the flavor of it more. And so it'd be interesting to repeat some of this as a blind taste test because of something's really amazing striped, marbleized, all kind of unique colors. We're going to want to like how it tastes.

So that's from my observations. And then I added out a few farmers markets as well. So from that, some of the clear winners were from my friend and colleague who has her own little seed operation, mainly focusing on tomatoes and peppers called Carmella Bella farm. Her name is Lisa Troutner. And a lot of these have really unique names like gunmetal gray or dragon's eye or lithium sunset or rebel starfighter. So she wasn't she's doing some breeding. These are not all variety. She's bred. She carries some material from Gates, who he's gotten a lot of attention for his Brad's atomic grape tomato, which is one of my favorites as well. But a lot of the lithium sunset was just a clear winner in our taste test. That one, it's kind of like a reddish orange yellow very distinct stripe, not like faint stripes, but really just bold stripes and marbleized on the inside. And a bit of that flattened pleated shape that I've seen from heirloom varieties from the Oaxaca Mexico area. Like we have a variety called Oaxaca Pink. And there's a few other ones, Tk Lula, Pink and Tlek Lula Gold. You can kind of, once you've grown enough varieties you can see like, oh this is a variety from Eastern Europe or this one's from Mexico. Exactly because again genetics right like you know people, if you know plants whatever you know you can see can see lineage in them, right? Once you're fully... Precisely.

Yeah.

So like, I have a lot of Eastern European descent,

...