It is common this time of year to see people contemplating which supermarket tomatoes to buy. Imported or greenhouse?
My thoughts leap forward to when I pick my homegrown tomatoes, ripened on the vine and still warm from the sun. If you have a garden or even a few pots on a balcony, you can certainly try growing a few tomato plants this spring to reap that same reward come summertime.
My mother-in-law gave me a handful of French heirloom tomatoes a couple of years ago. They were not the prettiest fruit I had ever seen, heirloom varieties can often be ungainly, but the flavour was amazing.
I made a tomato bread salad, sliced some up for burgers and sandwiches, then kept one of the biggest, juiciest and attractive ones for last.
I had never tried to save tomato seeds before. I thought that I’d somehow mess up the process, or it wouldn’t work, then I would have wasted perfectly good food. But I gave it a try and found that the process wasn’t hard at all.
My tomato seeds looked just like the ones I had been buying for years at the garden stores. I planted my seeds the next year, they grew into little seedlings, which then needed potting up into a bigger container.
I let them grow wild in the sunniest part of my garden and voila! French heirloom tomatoes galore. Enough of a harvest for me to share with my mother-in-law and still have lots left over.
Seeds can be expensive. Saving your own is a great way to bring some of that cost down and is very gratifying.
The Summerland Branch of the Okanagan Regional Library has been encouraging budding and avid gardeners to do just that since we opened our doors at 9533 Main St..
We transformed an old card catalogue into a seed library, and have been collecting a wide variety of vegetables, herbs and flower seeds for you to grow at home.
All you need is a library card and a little patch of dirt to get started. Check out 10 packages per season, grow them, then save some of the seeds to bring back to the library for others to share.
It’s not a novel concept (no pun intended); there are seed libraries located up and down the Okanagan Valley.
If you are interested in learning more about our seed library, come to The Summerland Friends of the Garden Seedy Saturday on March 24 from 10- a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Ornamental Gardens.
Don’t forget to bring your library card if you would like to check some seeds out. There will also be a great selection of gardening books, such as Growing Food in a Short Season by Melanie Watts, The Seed Garden edited by Lee Buttala and Shanyn Siegel and Xeriscape Plant Guide by Denver Water.
Let’s get Summerland growing!
Caroline McKay is an assistant community librarian at the Summerland Branch of the Okanagan Regional Library.