Eating Things To Save Them

Marketers tend to only offer the varieties that they sell the most of. As time goes by, this results in certain varieties being dropped. This happens both with fruits and vegetables as well as animals. Sometimes people will keep passing on the disappearing species, such as heirloom tomatoes, but sometimes they just disappear forever.

Here is an interesting idea in the times people eat more of these endangered varieties as this will, in turn, drive up market demand and increase the incentives to breed these species.

New York Times Story

Sunflower

The Circle Of Life

A lot was written in the newspapers and gardening blogs about what tough year this was for growing things. In addition to this being a very rainy and very cold year, there was also a tomato fungus that impacted in a good part of the east coast. In spite of all the troubles that people had in getting plants to grow where they wanted to grow, here are several examples I've found recently of things just growing without any help:

I had been sprouting seeds in trays on the patio earlier in the year. Here shiso and basil sprout next to the patio from seeds which most likely dumped from the sprouting trays.



At the end of the year last year, there were some green tomatoes left on the vine which Sean was tossing around. On the right of the shiso patch is a grape tomato plant which grew from one of those discarded tomatoes.



I had transplanted some tomato plants which later died, but which had dropped a lot of tomatoes which rotted on the ground before doing so. Now there are dozens of small tomato sprouts in that spot.



I had hung some pea plants upside down to dry for saving the seeds. Here a few peas must have fallen off the drying vines and sprouted on their own.