A very special tomato

Everyone always asked what our favorite tomato is and the answer is a variety that is not that common but is very special to us. The variety is called Copia and it is named for COPIA, the American Center of Food, Wine and the Arts in Napa, CA. It is a Marvel Stripe and Green Zebra cross and is not a variety many other farmers grow but we had a few seeds of it left that our dad saved in 2008 from tomatoes on his farm.

We both remember many years ago going to COPIA in Napa with our dad and walking around the gardens there and then later being given tomato seeds. Our dad then saved the seeds for some years but stopped in 2008 as he had to make some changes for the farm.

We only had a small bag that was partially filled with seeds left of this batch from 2008 but once we had them we knew we had to grow them. Old seed is much harder to germinate and we knew we had to take a different process to germinate the seeds than all the other varieties. We put the seeds on a damp paper towel and folded the towel over the seeds before putting it all in a ziplock bag at our house.

Over the course of two weeks we took the seeds that germinated and put them in a tray with potting soil where they grew until we transplanted them in the field. We expected maybe half of the seeds to germinate but surprisingly most of them did and grew into beautiful starts.

We then transplanted the starts out in the field with our main crop of tomatoes in the middle of April and have been taking care of them with a watchful eye since then. The fruit has just started to ripen over the past few weeks and we will be taking most of them to market.

The ones we don’t take to market will be ones we have selected to save for seeds for next year. We have already been watching and checking which plants are growing well and have high quality fruit that doesn’t have many imperfections. We will harvest those fruit soon and scoop the seeds out of them and go through the seed saving process with them.

By saving the seeds we will hopefully get the variety better adapted to the climate on our farm that produces a healthy plant and the fruit we are striving for from that variety of tomato.

Copia is not the only tomato we will be saving seed from, we are planning to save seeds from some of the other heirloom varieties that we are growing.

All of our heirloom tomatoes are producing a lot right now from our main planting along with a small amount from our first planting. It is so enjoyable to walk down the rows and pick these beautiful and delicious heirlooms and then take them to market and see everyone so excited that we have them.

The hot weather is ripening lots of the tomatoes and making us stay really on top of the watering. We also are keeping a good eye on the greenhouse as our first plantings of kale, collars, chard, cabbage, broccoli and lettuce have germinated and we need to keep them well watered. We are preparing the ground where we are going to plant those crops in a few weeks which is very exciting.

While we are trying to keep everything watered, we pulled water off of our onions so that they can get ready to harvest soon. We have some really nice yellow onions as well as some shallots that we will harvest soon and then cure before bringing them to market.