There used to be 408 varieties of tomato. Guess how many we have now.

[politicat]

39. Victory seeds has 345 tomato varieties listed.

All open pollinated, heirloom.

I grow Siberian tomatoes, because Colorado has weird weather -- freezes and snowstorms in May, drought year round, unpredictable autumn. Siberians can handle light freezes (28 degrees) and are adapted to shorter growing seasons with very long days and short nights.

Some Siberians are delightful in terms of flavor, but look like hell; others are beautiful and taste like cork. The plants can be difficult as well, being unruly and taking poorly to trellising. I suspect that nearly all tomatoes were this recalcitrant at one time; we've been domesticating them for centuries now, but they're all relatively recent domesticates.

I bought my first Siberian seeds from High Country Gardens, which is open to the public.

If the Seed Lab is not banking these seeds, it's not because they're not out there, and some varieties have died out because they weren't viable. I experimented one year with seeds that my great-great-grandmother saved in 1914. I sent most of the seeds we found in her box, about 50 grams, to several different repositories, but I kept a few grams of some, when we had a lot. I got about 20% of the seeds to germinate (not bad for then 90 year old seeds) and successfully got a total of 17 plants. Some were brilliant, but truly, paste tomatoes have improved significantly. Personally, I'm happy that the indeterminate gene has been selected in modern plants -- it's much easier to consume and preserve 5 pounds of tomatoes each week for 10 weeks than to process 500 pounds in 5 days. The current generation is also much more drought tolerant and significantly more resistant to blossom end rot.