I track carefully what a tomato should look and taste line, what type plant it grows on, and how the plant performs. I find several bee made crosses each year, but they don’t go into my seed storage except if I think they are really good. Cherokee Jumbo is an example where I found a bee made cross several years ago. It has stabilized out to an exceptionally good sandwich making tomato that I now offer.
I also plant my tomatoes in a pattern interleaved with peppers to create a gap between varieties. This does more to reduce crossing than anything else I do. If a variety is particularly difficult to find, I grow it in an isolation area so that crossing can’t occur.
I do understand what you are saying, and it would be bad to pay for some privilege and then lose it over a minor thing — such as, were the seeds ‘certified’ — rather than coming from Uncle Bob up the street.
But, I personally will not pay for a ‘certified organic’ fruit (I might for strawberries or something but the stores typically don’t carry that item as ‘certified organic’ anyhow around here).
Definitely I won’t pay 6.99 for a half pint of ‘organic’ blueberries when 3 pints are $6.00 of the regular ones (like in the Kroger ad last week–‘if you have a Kroger card’).
“Junior” out on State Road (whichever)…who sells homegrown organic tomatoes at the farm market cannot call them “Organic” because he isn’t “certified”. And, that being the case, because “Junior” isn’t in the size of business to justify “certification” costs–I will go out of my way to help out “Junior” rather than subsidize another Government program.
That makes sense. I just wasn’t sure how seedlings continued to remain the same variety but I guess if farmed on an industrial level it would be easier to keep seeds true to type as well, compared to the home gardener.
Great job its in general more important to buy local than organic and one of the negatives about organic production in the USA is its really hard to enter compared to other countries and has some rules that are difficult to follow and unfair to farmers. However as far as i know there is no “government organization” involved as every organic certification program is a non profit that i know of.
I have a problem with the sheer number of insecticides/pesticides in our food industry. While I don’t worry too much about organic as there is not IMO that much benefit, I do worry that our food supply has too many chemicals involved in production. For this reason, I spray my beans with pyganic and that is all I use for pest control. It is all that is needed. It is considered organically acceptable, but don’t let that fool you, pyganic is a deadly poison. It rapidly breaks down to harmless compounds so there is no long term residual effect like with many of the neonicotinoids.
If anyone orders from Adaptive Seeds, they are working on a limited schedule due to Covid and trying to stay ahead of huge order volume. They will be open for orders Feb 5-7th. So far they have plenty of seed on hand but I am sure some will run out.
The offer things that do well in the Pacific Northwest and handle some of Carol Deppe’s selections. I am trying some of her winter squash from there.
