I joined the Seed Savers Exchange a few months ago, and was excited to get the annual Yearbook in the mail a couple days ago. It is big -- 482 pages of rather fine print descriptions of plant varieties people have available.
I was rather curious to see what sorts of things it has, and have enjoyed it a lot. It is all fruits and vegetables,with a wide range of family heirlooms, and even more exciting to me, a surprising number people's personal breeding projects. I instantly gravitated to options like Kale 'Gulag Stars' which is described as: "Incredibly diversity unlike anything else, a mix of napus kales that have been crossed with B. rapa, bud pollinated by Tim Peters of Oregon to bypass species incompatibility mechanisms, crazy diversity of colors and shapes." (if you are not a SSE member, it is also available here) Be still my beating heart. How can I resist ANYTHING described as having "crazy diversity of colors and shapes" especially if it is the result of a cool and difficult to make interspecific cross? I'm such a plant breeding nerd...
I was a little surprised, though, when I got to the tomato section. I love a good tomato, but seriously? There is some insanely tomato love going on here. This is me holding the section of the book devoted to just listings of tomato varieties:
Fully 200 of the 482 pages with nothing but tomatoes. It is almost enough to make me stop breeding tomatoes and start focusing on everything else... tomatoes are good, but spread the love, people!