Canuck Grow-outs 2006

[carolyn137]

I'll get back to you if I find out anything re Joe's Long Cayenne in TO. I have contacts within the wonderful and generous seedsaving Italian community there. Could you clarify please whether Joe's Round/Amazzo also came to Joe via Toronto? Thanks!


Jennifer,

I still have Joe's phone number and if he's still alive could call him and get the name of his relative from whom he got the seeds.

But Joe told me everything that was known about those two varieties when Janika, Rob's wife, e-mailed me about listing it at Johnny's.

And as I said, those two varieties, both of which Joe got from his relative in Toronto, did NOT have names attached to them. He also had a basil that he got from his relative.

So I don't see how you could find out anything more other than what Joe has already passed on to me that he got from his relative in Toronto.

I met Joe at Charlie's greenhouses. Every year Joe would turn up with his pepper and basil seeds and ask Charlie to sow them for him. In return Charlie and his wife would get lucious Italian pastries made by Joe's wife. And, ahem, a case of beer.

Charlie would open up some of his tomato fields to U pick about the middle of the season and that's how the initial contact was made between Charlie and Joe.

And Joe would be hanging out around the greenhouses when I'd be transplanting my tomatoes. So one day I asked him if I could have some seed for the two peppers and asked him if he wanted seeds for any other hot peppers, which I had lots of at that time b'c I was still listing those in the SSE Yearbook, or any tomato varieties.

But he declined my offer, in the nicest of ways.

[cdntomato]

Carolyn, thanks for the reply re Joe's Round also coming to Joe via Toronto.

I'm trying to figure out how to explain this clearly. Bear with me please.

Seeds are not a single thing in time/space like a painting. Joe's Long and Joe's Round did not stop being grown in Toronto, named or not named, once they were sent to Joe then you for wider circulation under new names. They are more likely than not still being grown, perhaps under other names, and more than likely without knowledge that the Long and Round offered in catalogues are the very same varieties. Consider what I am doing then as trying to connect the dots in history and present.

So you see I am not questioning what was or wasn't done in the past, but rather trying find and document the other threads of these varieties' lives.

Did I explain my reasoning more clearly now?

And that polite declining of your offer is something that I have found in EVERY 'Old World' oriented Italian and Portuguese seedsaver to date.

I am developing a "Growing Home Project" which documents what folks have brought from their native lands to grow in Canada--their comfort foods to prevent too much homesickness or because those varieties are 'better' than what they could otherwise find here, if they can find them at all.

Jennifer

[cdntomato]

K, you bad

Kim, will do.

Jennifer