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Old February 12, 2012   #51
Petronius_II
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Join Date: Jan 2012
Location: Albuquerque, NM - Zone 7a
Posts: 209
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WARNING: Yet more long-windedness followeth. Proceed at your peril.

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mixing sex and my love of gardening, and especially tomatoes , makes me feel kinda ill. Sorry penny, hope it works for you, sex has sold many a product I know.
Well, I sort of feel the same way about the Peter Pepper, but it hasn't changed one bit my enthusiasm for those fine seedsmen and seedswomen who include it in their offerings. I first read about it on one of Gleckler's old mailing lists, after all.

It's not really the pepper itself that bothers me. It's the catering to the notion -- very popular among both wishy-washy middle-of-the-road liberals and stylishly pseudolibertarian conservatives-- that one is somehow being daring and iconoclastic by growing the Peter Pepper.

To me, daring would be something like breeding a naked-seeded pumpkin or squash that is easy to grow, disease and drought resistant, and incredibly productive-- something like Rob Johnston I think it was did when he bred Baby Bear, only maybe even better-- and then corraling the resources to produce that seed in massive quantities, followed by sending X numbers of said seeds free of charge to groups like Oxfam, and to the agriculture departments of, say, Ethiopia, Sudan, Haiti, Ecuador, Kazakhstan etc. Someplace where people are rather hungry, and without good reason other than the non-hungry people of the world think they're too busy with problems of their own.

...Or maybe do the same with an OP/stabilized hybrid corn of the kind of which I dream on a regular basis. As big and productive as Mexican June corn. Roughly as sweet as Iochief, or maybe Buhl. As high in protein as Hopi Blue. Maybe all three primary colors of kernels on the same ear: yellow, red, blue. Something fairly close to a full nutritious meal out of a single plant.

...And then just give it away for free to whomever needs it. Asking nothing in return but enough resources to keep you going a few more miles down the road.

Do something resembling that, and I'll call you daring and iconoclastic. But growing the Peter Pepper, and snickering about how cool it looks? Nahhhh, that's just for pretenders, know what I mean?

...But I would be interested in knowing more about just what Penny's some-kind-of-a-treelike tomato is really like. Maybe that tomato has some hard-to-find genes that would make for really good breeding stock.

As for the tone of Penny's site... Well, I've only sold a very few garden seeds on Ebay, and that's the meager extent of my commercial experience, but I've plenty of experience selling other things altogether, in a wide variety of markets.

As I see it, when one is in business, one tends to find that people who are unlikely to ever buy anything from you, are still worthy of one's respect and consideration, and sometimes of action calculatedly taking their opinions and feelings into account.

People who already do buy from one, without so many entreaties (justified or non-) to jump through X number of hoops-- they deserve all the same, only a whole lot more so.

...So I tend to think that for the most part, with some obvious exceptions, Penny ought to stick with what works for her.
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