My Tomato Collection for the 2014 Season!

There is no hiding that tomatoes are my all-time favourite home-grown vegetable. I love that they come in an amazing range of colours, shapes and flavours. Twisting my fingers on the deeply aromatic and piney leaves. Grown successfully they can offer pounds of gourmet fruit; fresh, frozen, cooked, preserved, and sun-dried, the possibilities are endless. Heirloom tomatoes makes me weak at the knees, and as many vegetable growing gardeners know seeds are crack and your "collection" is soon a hoard of variations. This photo-collage below is a collection of (almost) all my tomato seeds. I just ordered a big batch online to fill my stocking... Santa knows me so well.

I recently ordered seeds from a few sources. I strongly recommend you go visit them and take a look, not just for tomatoes but for other seeds as well. I bought some other vegetables too, but I'll share those in later postings.

After seeing the name "Wild Boar" or "Boar" on some new tomato introductions at many of my go-to seed companies, I started to fall in love with all the beautiful striped and jewel toned fruits. I then wandered onto The Wild Boar Farms website, the origin of these amazingly unique tomatoes. Located in Napa Vally, CA, tomato breeder extraordinaire Bradley Gates offers some of the most amazing tomatoes on the market. The Wild Boar Shop has some 50 varieties and 6 new introductions. I look forward to doing some customer reviews next fall. I'll write more about Wild Boar in my new blog segment "Sunday Seed Spotlight".

The next stop on my tomato seed tour is Trade Wind Fruits. Another great California source, based out of Santa Rosa, CA, Trade Wind Fruits do not carry any known GMO seeds and stock an amazing variety of tropical fruit, vegetables, peppers, tomatoes and herbs. I came to Trade Winds so that I could buy the bizarre "Varigated Tomato" and I expanded my shopping from there. Wow! Do they ever stock the most colourful selection of tomatoes!

I then moved onto Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Co. (more on them in upcoming posts). They are the go to stop for all seeds rare and heirloom. I've had my cart full for a few weeks and I took advantage of my seed shopping spree and finally purchased a mixed collection of seeds, including these amazing purple dwarf peas.

My final stop was closer to home; Toronto's Cubits Rare Heirloom & Organic Seeds. They are a homegrown small company with adorable brown paper seed packages with a black line drawing picture of a yellow lab all sold through Etsy. They don't have a huge range of seeds, but they have a great reputation for quality and I found a few great tomatoes to add to my collection.

I'm very excited for the 2014 season, I'll have upwards of 35 tomato plants, and plans to expand my raised bed space for an optimum harvest, and possible cross breeding of my own new varieties. There are a few other varieties I'd like... but I don't think I'll have room. Expect the list to grow.