[PhilSeneca]

Skano, my name is Phil Seneca and I am a tomato breeder and seed keeper from Onodowaga nation, split by the US/canada border, a member nation of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee confederacy.

I center my seed keeping efforts around the preservation and restoration of staple indigenous food plants like corn, beans, squash, sunroot, sunflower, amaranth, apios, and others, and incorporate other crops from elsewhere in Turtle Island like tomato which has become a bit of an obsession for me.

Working on keeping precolumbian domesticated tomato gene pools adapted to modern diseases, incorporation of novel alleles from wild and species tomato introgression, expanding on the founder genetics of the OSU and striped cultivars, and micro-dwarf development are some of my top priorities next to basic selection of flavor and productivity.

Last year I released Grungy in the Sky Bicolor, which won 1st place at the 2014 Buffalo/Niagara annual tomato competition, for best tomato flavor overall. A collaborative effort, the late Valerie (Grungy) McMurray developed one of the parent lines, and the other was Skykomish developed by Tom Wagner, who preformed the original cross pollination between them. Since then I have been selecting for color, production, flavor, and inheritance of strong late blight resistance due to the homozygous recessive PH2 and PH3 genes from Skykomish. It seems that all of our mutual effort resulted in a future classic, something truly special. In addition to Grungy in the Sky I have recently released a number of other unique and exclusive cultivars which I hope you take the time to investigate at tatiana's TOMATObase.

I am grateful for the support I have received in my work with tomatoes and hope to find others here with interests similar to my own.

Onah ki wahi, skennen.
-Phil Seneca