Rare and Heirloom Veggie Plant Sale
This is an amazing fun plant sale for those of us that are crazy about plants. We are calling it our Freaks of the Garden Sale. This will be the sixth year of the Peaceful Belly Tomato Plant Sale. The Sale will be held April 30–May 1, May 7–8 and May 14–15 at our Farm on Broken Horn Road, in the Dry Creek Valley, 9 to 5 pm. We raise over 170 types of Tomatoes all from seed, 80 types of peppers, squash, melons, eggplants, herbs and so much more. It seems a little crazy but we want the folks of this area to understand the massive diversity in the agricultural plant world. Commercial Agriculture is causing so many agricultural plant species to become extinct by not growing them for consumers. It is easier for farmers to grow just a few varieties of tomatoes for commercial use but this is cause major damage in the preservation of seeds and the diversification of plant species. It will be up to the small farms and the home gardens to save these precious jewels for the future. Every time you grow a heirloom tomato plant and you save the seed you are doing your part to help preserve seeds for the future.
We started our tomato Plant Sale all by accident. The first year we held it we were selling all of the Tomato plants that we had left over from the farm. We held the sale in our front yard of a little house we were renting on 16th. The plants all sold in an hour and we knew right then that Boise was hungry for tomatoes.
The History of the Tomato
After the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Spanish distributed the tomato throughout their colonies in the Caribbean. They also took it to the Philippines, from where it spread to southeast asiaand then the entire Asian continent. The Spanish also brought the tomato to Europe. It grew easily in Mediterranean climate, and cultivation began in the 1540s. It was probably eaten shortly after it was introduced, and was certainly being used as food by the early 1600s in Spain. The earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692, though the author had apparently obtained these recipes from Spanish sources. However, in certain areas of Italy, such as Florence, the fruit was used solely as tabletop decoration before it was incorporated into the local cuisine in the late 17th or early 18th century.
