Yummy Peppers
Perfect little ‘snack peppers’. These petite peppers grow 2 inches long and are extra-sweet, tender-crisp, nearly seedless and keep for a long time when refrigerated. Slice them in half and fill with cheese or dips, grill them on skewers with your favorite meats or pack them in lunch boxes as a fresh treat.
Cherry Tomatoes
Cherry tomatoes range in size from a thumbtip up to the size of a golf ball, and can range from being spherical to slightly oblong in shape. The more oblong ones often share characteristics with plum tomatoes, and are known as grape tomatoes.
Corno di Toro Peppers
The name “Corno di Toro” is actually Italian for “Horns of the Bull”. Though their red color suggests chile pepper heat, these peppers are actually some of the sweetest peppers around. In fact, the yellow variety of these peppers was voted among the best sweet peppers by Sunset Magazine.
Heirloom Tomatoes
An heirloom is generally considered to be a variety that has been passed down, through several generations of a family because of it’s valued characteristics. Since ‘heirloom’ varieties have become popular in the past few years there have been liberties taken with the use of this term for commercial purposes. Heirlooms have been classified into four categories:
1. Commercial Heirlooms: Open-pollinated varieties introduced before 1940, or tomato varieties more than 50 years in circulation.
2. Family Heirlooms: Seeds that have been passed down for several generations through a family.
3. Created Heirlooms: Crossing two known parents (either two heirlooms or an heirloom and a hybrid) and dehybridizing the resulting seeds for how ever many years/generations it takes to eliminate the undesirable characteristics and stabilize the desired characteristics, perhaps as many as 8 years or more.
4. Mystery Heirlooms: Varieties that are a product of natural cross-pollination of other heirloom varieties.
In the past 40 years, we’ve lost many of our heirloom varieties, along with the many smaller family farms that supported heirlooms. The multitude of heirlooms that had adapted to survive well for hundreds of years were lost or replaced by fewer hybrid tomatoes, bred for their commercially attractive characteristics.
(originally posted in the 8-25-09 CSA newsletter)
