Free seeds

I got some free seeds today. Yay! Free is always good and these are heirloom and other unique tomato seeds. They threw in some Swiss chard and African marigold seeds too. They came from an outfit called Wintersown.
http://www.wintersown.org/wseo1/Free_Seeds.html
The deal is you send them a SASE and they send you the seeds. Simple as that. They'd like a donation too as they are a not for profit seed bank. I plan to send them some seeds at the end of the season.

Here's the tomato seeds they sent me:

Berkeley Tie Dye
Brandywine
Ramapo
Arkansas Traveler
Bear Claw
Cherokee Chocolate
Jack White
Black Krim

Each of the tiny zip lock bags has between eight and sixteen seeds which is enough for my purposes. The commercial seed packets have way too many tomato seeds for the casual gardener if you asked me. Really, do I need forty beefsteak plants? This is one reason why gardeners usually have leftover seeds that are several years old in their collection. Speaking of which; my mother (who will celebrate her ninetieth birthday this Monday) gave me a bunch of seed packets this past fall. She has obviously had them kicking around in drawers for years. Many years. "Packaged for 1991" I decided to experiment and put a few tomato seeds from 1997 in peat pellets to see if they would germinate. That was about a week ago and still no sprouts. At this point I don't think they are going to spring to life. I have heard that they have found viable seeds in Egyptian tombs. Well this aint Egypt and I suspect that wherever my mother had these seeds stored was less than ideal for seed storage. In any case I have some Brandy boy tomato seeds that were left over from the 07 season and I'm hoping that I have stored them properly. I like Brandy Boy, it is a more disease resistant hybrid of Brandywine with higher yields.

As the winter progresses and I find different sources for seeds my list of stuff to grow changes. Well, it would be more accurate to say it gets bigger. For instance, I got a catalog in the mail the other day, High Mowing Organic Seeds, and they have a couple things I can't resist; one is a purple broccoli - Rosalind - while that isn't too unusual the other is something called Veronica Romanesco, F1 hybrid. ""Italian cauliflower" in reference to this vegetable's northern Italian roots dating back to the fifteenth century." It's just flat out weird looking. It doesn't look anything like cauliflower. I'm a sucker for weird looking things. It could taste like steel wool mixed with Drano and I'd grow it least once but the catalog goes on to say that it is more tender than cauliflower with a nutty taste. Nutty is good. I like nutty. Umm, shut up.

Veronica Romenesco. Weird lookin, aint it?