Cylia's Blog – August 2011 Archive (4)

Thought I would post a pic of the harvested tomatoes.

Robust red tomato - Victoria (4 oz)

Purpley red - Black Prince (2.25 oz)

Golden yellow - Taxi (2 oz x 2)

Golden yellow pear shaped - Yellow Pear (didn't register on…

This year I decided to grow several varieties to check out how they would do on my patio and to determine if I wanted to grow them again. There are hundreds of kinds of tomatoes and I am growing 11 heritage varieties (12 in total), planted either in Ikea self-watering black plastic garden pots and/or my garden boxes (on wheels). With the self-watering pots I only need to water every other day, at least during the hot summer. This is what I have found out so far.…

With some of our Neighborhood Small Grants funding (thank you Vancouver Foundation), our seed saving collective has purchased three books:

(1) "Breed your own Vegetable Varieties" by Carol Depp

(2) "Seed to Seed" by Susan Ashworth, both of which are available to borrow.…

At around 8 a.m., after I had quickly consumed my breakfast fruit smoothie, I harvested pea seed from my dried vines. We didn't eat many peas this spring even though four varieties were planted in our patio garden boxes. One "Oregon Sugar" and "Green Arrow" came up, even though the same number of seed were planted in each row. Perhaps we planted too late since peas won't germinate if it's too warm.

The heritage…