Tomatoes Part II – Chicagoist Gets Seedy

By Kevin Grzyb in Food on Apr 22, 2005 8:29PM

Seeds or seedlings? This is the intellectual debate that plagues us every year in early to mid-April. We know that the only way to obtain August tomato nirvana is to grow our own, but on a cold, rainy April day, that’s a long way off and it’s just hard to get into the mindset of gardening knowing that we won’t get outside for another six weeks or so.

Well, Chicagoist being the tomato loving glutton for punishment, we went for the hardcore grow em from seed and reap the rewards later. The reward in our eyes: variety. Heirloom variety. You can go online and literally find thousands of heirloom tomato seeds from all around the world. Heirloom tomatoes you say? What’s that? Is that like canned tomatoes? No, no it’s not. Heirloom tomatoes are tomatoes that are grown from seeds that are collected and stored at the end of each harvest so as to plant the same variety the next year and for years to come. Farmers and their families have bred tomatoes for color, size, flavor and use (among other traits) and the seeds are passed down from year to year and from generation to generation…like a family heirloom. Some heirloom tomatoes have the great names like the 'Mortgage Lifter' and 'Box Car Willie'or simply descriptive names like 'Black Krim' with dark purple to black coloring.

We went to TomatoBob.com after Googling heirloom tomato seeds and choose some seeds. We got the heirloom sampler that includes: Green Grape, Green Zebra, Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Red Pear, Yellow Pear, Amish Paste, Cherokee Purple, White Wonder, and Black Krim. Mainly the variety in the size of the fruit (yep fruit, not vegetable) was the factor for choice. The green grape, red and yellow pears, which we’ve grown with great success several years in the past are small, like the diameter of a nickel to a quarter and therefore will be great in our hanging garden experiment (more on that in later updates).

If you want to grow tomatoes, but don’t want to do the whole planting from seed, one in spirit with your tomato plant children thing, then you can sit back down on the couch and wait until the first couple of weeks of May when the nurseries start getting in their spring seedlings from the greenhouses. You can also do a search for heirloom tomato seedlings and have them shipped to you directly, they’re more expensive than seeds, but probably easier if you don’t have the proverbial ‘green thumb.’ Chicagoist loves to go to Gethsemane Garden Center because they have a good selection and knowledgeable people who really love to garden. We know that the seedlings are cheaper at Home Depot, but they were probably stored in a truck or on a dock before being put on the floor and picked over by the kind of people that would buy their seedling at Home fucking Depot… but I digress. Snobs. Us. Okay, but when we sit back and talk about munching down on a green zebra (so that’s where he got the name) BLT with grilled herbed potatoes and homemade rhubarb-ginger ale, you know you’ll want some.

Previously: The Greatest Rite of Spring (Tomatoes Part I)
Next up: Seedling progress and planting preparation.