So true! We ought to refuse the bred-for-shipping varieties that our home
grown MBAs have given us. Maybe if everyone rejected the crap served in
restaurants we could reverse the trend. But there is hope, as in
http://www.tomatofest.com/home.html and many others--for the investment of
some time and some earth.

Jay Knepper

"Swingman" wrote in message
...
"Bob Schmall" wrote in message

Got any wood-frame (Obww) farmer's tomato stands in your area? We're
just
wrapping up the second coldest summer on record, and I finally, today,
the
First of September, found ripe tomatoes at the local stand. Sheesh.

Global warming, eh?

We do have an abundance of farmer's produce markets and stands down here
in
Texas, but most of the tomatoes are still of the hybrid variety that are
"engineered" more for shelf life than taste. I've been growing my own for
a
while, on the front porch in an "earth box", but the varieties available
as
seedlings are the same, basically tasteless, hybrids that you get at the
markets.

Taste being one of the last things to go, and wanting to take full
advantage
of that fact, it is apparent that if I want to taste a real tomato again,
like the one's we had as kids on the farm, I am going to have to go to
extraordinary measures to do so. Next year I want to plant some old
heirloom
seeds, in a flat like we used to do, then transplant to the "earth box",
and
see if that doesn't improve things.

I've got a shaker with a combination of salt and pepper in it out in the
shop (Obww), and always keep a couple of tomatoes in the shop fridge ...
keeps your hand steady for those taper jig cuts.

--
www.e-woodshop.net
Last update: 7/10/04

In article ,
otforme (Charlie Self) wrote:

I checked. Should have done it first. Try www.burpee.com

Ah, the memories...

Back when I was about 10 years old (c.1971) I spotted an ad in the back
of Boy's Life magazine and sent away for a Burpee seed sales kit. The
idea was to ring bells door-to-door and offer quality, well-known Burpee
flower and garden seeds to the neighbors. By selling certain amounts of
seeds a boy would earn rewards at whatever level of sales he achieved.

A small box arrived a couple weeks later with quite a sampling of
various plant seeds. Excitedly I hit the streets in our smallish,
out-of-town neighborhood in northern Virginia. Surprisingly the
neighbors were quite receptive and before long I had amassed quite a
tidy sum of coin in the collection envelope with my seed stock
practically depleted. As I recall I had sold something on the order of
$15 or $20 worth of Burpee packets at 10¢ or 25¢ apiece.

My chosen reward was a wooden box chock full of an assortment of X-Acto
blades and handle. Wow were those things sharp. I didn't have a history
of carving or whittling (obww). Nor did I seriously take up the craft
afterwards. I didn't want to dull the blades, after all. Everything
seemed just as it should be. I sent away, they sent to me, I sold and
submitted the proceeds, they sent me my payment. Budding
entrepreneurialism wed to good ol' capitalism. Beautiful. (Not to
mention the trust Burpee was extending to all those boys.) Then...

One day my older sister was using one of the blades for something or
other. The long blade slipped off of the object and cleanly sliced into
the web of skin and muscle between her thumb and forefinger. My mother
confiscated the, *my*, X-Acto knife set. Too dangerous she said. Jeez.

Kinda like the Cox Red Baron, gas, fly-by-wire biplane I got for
Christmas when I was about 11 or 12. My mother took it upon herself to
be the first to try it out as my Dad fired it up. As the plane took off
and gained altitude, she spun around and around and around trying to
control it and keep up with it. A half dozen rotations and she lost her
bearings, driving the plane directly into the ground, breaking the wing
struts and doing serious damage to the future aerodynamics. Out of
commission before I even got a turn. Jeez...

--
Owen Lowe and his Fly-by-Night Copper Company
--

"Osama WHO?" asked *.