I’ve been hard at work on my painted-warp presentation for ANWG. I have over 60 samples, and am still weaving more. I’m now in that entirely predictable stage of existential despair (familiar to anyone who has ever written a book, taught a class, or done any other sort of presentation) wherein you realize that:

1. there is far more to the subject that you ever realized
2. you’re not going to know everything perfectly before you have to go teach it
3. even in your ignorance, there’s no way you can fit even 1/100 of the absolutely vital things you know about the subject into a 2-hour lecture.

Elizabeth Gilbert, in her marvelous TED talk about the creative process, references “that point when you’re writing a book when you’re convinced that it’s going to be the worst book ever – not just bad, but The. Worst. Book. Ever.” That’s about where I am right now with this presentation. I’m well aware that it’s a phase, I’ve been through it before with just about everything I’ve ever written/presented/taught, and everything has always turned out just fine – but it’s frustrating nonetheless.

So what do the tough do to relax when the going gets tough?

Well, duh – take over the world, of course!

The adorable little tomato plants are now blooming and preparing to take over the world. Which means it’s time to get going on my nefarious tomato breeding plans.

My plans with Fruity Mix are fairly modest. It got cross-bred with something, so for the next several years, I’m just growing out 30-40 plants per year and selecting from the offspring until the flavor breeds true in all the offspring. That will take 6-7 years, following which I will start breeding it to other things.

Fuzzy Mix, on the other hand, is small, fuzzy, extremely productive, and also very drought-resistant, because of its thick, leathery leaves. It has nondescript red oval fruit, and the flavor could best be described as “dilute battery acid,” so it definitely needs some breeding work. Here’s what a mature Fuzzy Mix plant looks like:

Since I don’t have a whole lot of space, and I have to work with container plants anyway since my soil has a tomato-killing fungus in it (verticillium wilt), I’ve decided to breed smaller tomato plants rather than full-size tomato plants. In particular, I think it would be interesting to breed tomato plants that would work for the patio gardener – moderately sized, attractive tomato plants that bear tons of tasty tomatoes and can survive neglect. Fuzzy Mix, as a small, fuzzy-leafed, drought-resistant tomato, brings a lot of good genes to the table, and if I can cross-breed it with a tomato with good flavor and attractive fruit, I might get some really cool results.

So I’ve planted a whole bunch of interesting tomato varieties and am doing an abundant assortment of crosses. Probably the most interesting set are crosses with some microdwarf varieties from tomato breeder Dan Follett. His microdwarfs will mostly top out at 11″ and under, though a few are a bit taller. Because the varieties he’s sent are mostly experimental (i.e. not stable yet), I’m not sure what the fruits are going to look or taste like. So I’m doing speculative crosses – cross-pollinate first and decide whether to save seeds later, after the fruits have matured and I’ve had a chance to taste them.

Since I know you’re just dying to know how one cross-pollinates tomatoes (I mean, doesn’t everyone want to know how to take over the world??), I thought I’d share some photos of the process.

First step: steal the electric toothbrush from the bathroom. If your spouse objects, explain that you are engaged in secret activities that will eventually result in total world domination. If your spouse makes unhappy noises about not wanting teeth stained with tomato-plant juice (spouses can be extraordinarily short-sighted!), temporarily placate spouse by promising to use a different toothbrush head.

Next step: collect pollen by using the tomato-pollination toothbrush head to vibrate a mature flower from the male parent, causing it to shoot a small burst of pollen onto a piece of black plastic. (The label on the plastic lid is the plant number of the plant providing the pollen, for recordkeeping purposes.)

This particular plant is one of Dan Follett’s crosses, and goes by the sexy name of 70X F4 R/Y. Here’s a pic of the label, which contains the description I got from Dan:

Translating this into English: this is a fourth generation selection of a cross between Red Robin, Rose Quartz, and Girl Girl’s Weird Thing (I’ll spare you the exact details of the cross-breeding). The previous generation was 9″ tall, had the multiflora gene – multiflora means a ridiculous number of fruit on a single fruiting branch, with red fruit/yellow stripes, nipples on the end of the fruit, and extra good flavor. I’m not 100% sure but I think the RL (nearly PL) refers to “regular leaf, nearly potato leaf”. I keep meaning to ask Dan, but keep forgetting.

I want to breed this one to Fuzzy Mix for a few reasons. First, I like the idea of a ridiculously large number of red and yellow striped fruit in a cluster; it sounds like it would make for a very pretty plant. Looking at this particular plant, it looks like the fruit come in an umbrella of fruit rather than long strings (like Sweet 100 or Sweet Million):

Second, it has a very attractive, upright, open growth habit. You might have noticed that Fuzzy Mix is a very dense bush – so dense, in fact, that it’s impossible for air to get into the center. Not very attractive and might promote disease. This tomato has a nicer shape than Fuzzy Mix. So if I can get the pretty fruit, the clusters of fruit, and the growth habit of this tomato type, and the fuzziness and drought resistance of Fuzzy Mix, I’ll have a pretty nice container tomato variety.

Okay, so what’s the next step?

Step two is every feminist’s dream (well, according to some folks, anyway): emasculation.

Tomatoes are self-pollinating, and in most cases have self-pollinated before the flower even opens. So to cross-pollinate a tomato, you have to catch a tomato flower before the pollen is released, cut off the male parts (okay, guys, you can uncross your legs now 🙂 ), and then pollinate the female parts with the pollen you collected earlier.

So here goes.

First, you find a tomato blossom of the right maturity. Too small and the stigma (the female part) will be too immature to accept the pollen. Too big and the anthers (male bits) will have matured and released their pollen, pollinating the stigma. So you want a tomato blossom that is almost but not quite mature. Full grown but not quite opening yet, and definitely not bright yellow. This one looks about right:

Next, you take a pointy but not razor sharp object and open up the flower. I used the tips of my embroidery scissors, as you can see. (Yeah, those are the good sewing scissors…shhh, don’t tell anyone 😉 )

Now that the flower’s been opened up, you can see the stigma – it’s the little greenish yellow thing sticking out in the center of the flower. You keep that, and cut away everything else. Congratulations! You are now a card-carrying, tomato-castrating feminist – you have just emasculated your first tomato flower:

The next step is to pollinate the emasculated flower using the pollen you collected earlier. Drag the stigma through the puddle of pollen. Use multiple pollen-puddles if you want to be sure:

Congratulations! You have cross-pollinated your first tomato flower, and taken your first step towards breeding your very own killer mutant ninja tomato variety. You’ve joined the ranks of Evil Tomato Breeders for Total World Domination (or at least a Tastier Tomorrow)!

There’s just one step left, which is of course to label your new cross for record-keeping purposes, so you know which of the adorable little tomato fruits will be the one to bring down world governments and launch the world into chaos. I use a little bit of leftover weaving yarn and some indestructible Avery GHS Ultra Duty Chemical Labels left over from my yarn sample dyeing to label each cross-pollinated blossom with the numbers of the male and female parents:

It’s important to sterilize your equipment between plants, of course. You wouldn’t want pollen cross-contamination, so I found a small container perfect for sterilizing scissors. Honk if you’re ancient enough to recognize what it is.

And where have the cats been? Alas, they have been feeling rather left out of all this world conquest, since they’re not allowed out of the house. Tigress, however, has not been idle. If she can’t get into the garden to hunt lizards and mice, she’ll hunt other things. Or so I am (oh-so-innocently) told.

It’s a darn good thing she’s also the most adorable cat ever!

I just finished teaching my Color Courage for Weavers Workshop course! Or rather, I finished releasing all the lessons and did all the live lectures – some students are still finishing the exercises, and I’ll be giving feedback on the exercises through June. But the bulk of the work is done, and from now on I’ll be working primarily on revamping the current course offerings, developing new courses – and, of course, taking over the world through my killer mutant ninja tomato breeding project.

Which is coming along nicely, thank you for asking!

My Fruity Mix tomatoes were a little unhappy and chlorotic when they were set out into the garden two weeks ago. They looked like this:

Two weeks later, they have settled in, greened up, and are preparing to take over the world:

These are going to be a little crowded – I planted four per 30-gallon tub. My plan is to keep them pinched back to 2-3 stems each, and grow them up rather than letting them sprawl. My goal here is not to get a lot of fruit but to evaluate each plant for the quality of its fruit. I’ll likely cull a lot of the plants midway through the growing season, keeping only the best plants for saving seed. (And for tasty fruit!)

Because I decided to crowd the Fruity Mix four to a tub, I wound up having more space than I originally planned for. Which of course meant…more tomatoes! (I mean, what else would you expect me to grow?) So in addition to my 32 Fruity Mix tomatoes, I’m growing nine Fuzzy Mix (for breeding purposes…the fruits are essentially inedible), sixteen to twenty varieties for breeding (I kinda lost track of the exact number), and a bunch of microdwarf tomatoes, some of which are cool and exotic, like these:

This is a fuzzy fine-leaf microdwarf. It’s hard to make out because of the fuzziness, but the leaves are very finely divided – beautiful and decorative! And it’s a microdwarf because it will get no more than 12″ tall. It’s a breeding project from Dan Follett – I’m growing it out partly to return feedback (and seeds) to him, but also to cross-breed it to Fuzzy Mix. I think it’s a beautiful little tomato plant! Can’t wait to see what the fruits look like.

The rest of the garden is going well, too. The garlic is growing like mad:

The blueberries are blueberrying:

The asparagus is also coming up (in spades!), the aprium is loaded with green fruit, our bird-of-paradise plant is blooming for the first time since we planted it, and the roses are going crazy, but no photos of those just yet…It is full-on spring in California, and I am scrambling to get on top of the weeds, put in stakes and supports, and set up the drip irrigation!

I am also weaving samples like crazy for my painted warp seminar at the ANWG conference in June…but this blog post is long enough already, so I’ll write about that in the next one. Suffice it to say that I’m up to 55 samples already and expect to be well over 100 samples by the time of the lecture…and would like to have 200+ by the time I finish developing the online course. Because one can never have too many samples!

I’ll leave you with a teaser photo of the samples. A cat heightens the mystery!

A bit over a week ago, the East Coast and the Midwest were seized in a polar vortex. It was colder in Wisconsin than it was in Antarctica.

And in California?

The peaches were blooming:

So were the roses, despite our winter pruning:

And the violets:

The violets deserve special mention. I love violets because I grew up on the East Coast. They are not native here, and in Sunnyvale, it is too warm, too sunny, and too dry for them. We have had to resort to extreme measures to keep them alive: a shady spot and daily spraying with misters to keep things moist enough for them to survive. Friends who visit from the East Coast take one look and say, “Why are you growing weeds??” Well, I happen to love these weeds. They were part of my childhood, and they are by the front door because they make me happy every time I see them. 🙂

At any rate, in California, the beginning of February can mean only one thing: Time to plant tomatoes! And so it began.

This year, because I was planting saved seed, and because I was planting seed from other seed savers, I decided to try something new: a hot-water treatment to kill fungi and other pathogens. To do this with tomatoes, you put the seeds in a hot-water bath at 122F for 25 minutes. This is hot enough to kill the pathogens, but not hot enough to kill the seeds.

So I got a sous vide cooker (because doesn’t everyone cook their tomato seeds sous vide?), got a bunch of paper tea bags, and set to work with my twenty or so packets of tomato seeds. (Lest anyone think I’m only growing twenty tomato plants – quelle horreur! – I’m actually growing 32 Fruity Mix plants this year, from 4 different seed collections, plus 10-12 other varieties, both for breeding and for breeding to my Fuzzy Mix plants, which will be sown about a month later. I plan to grow 60-70 plants total, though I will likely pull out all but the best ones later in the season.)

Here’s what my setup looked like shortly before plunging into the sous vide. The teabags with seeds are clamped together at the top to keep them shut, so the seeds don’t escape in the water bath.

And here they are in the sous vide bath (just as it was cooling):

I planted them in soil blocks, which are preferable to pots because the roots naturally air-prune, rather than reaching the sides of the pots and then circling around and around. The labels are printed on the nearly-indestructible labels I used for my dye samples, and will last through an entire season of sun, water, and slugs. (I tried paper labels once. Slugs ate them.)

I worried that the hot water bath might kill some of the seeds. Quite the opposite. Tomato seeds normally take 7-10 days to germinate. I came back four days later to find the first ones popping out of the soil!

A day later, most of them had germinated. Wow! I’m definitely doing that again next year.

My nefarious breeding plans for this year are primarily to stabilize Fruity Mix. This year’s batch had only three out of twenty plants with the intense, fruity flavor I remembered. I saved seed from those three plants and am growing 32 plants from that seed. I will save seed from the best of those plants, grow another 30-odd plants next year, and continue until I have enough stability in the line to feel good about sending it to others.

Fuzzy Mix, on the other hand, is stable enough to use for breeding work as-is. The flavor is terrible, though, so I want to breed it to a better-tasting tomato. My goal is a dwarf tomato maybe 18″ or shorter, with fuzzy leaves and beautiful fruit, that would make an attractive container plant – suitable for people who want a beautiful plant that also bears beautiful, tasty tomatoes. So this year I’m growing an assortment of tomatoes with small, yellow-and-red striped, tasty fruit. My intent is to breed them to Fuzzy Mix and see what happens.

I’ve also just gotten seeds for some fuzzy leaf, multiflora, red and yellow striped microdwarfs from another tomato breeder. Microdwarfs are very small tomatoes, that grow maybe 10-12″ tall, and multiflora tomatoes grow large bunches of tomatoes. These seem like great candidates for breeding to Fuzzy Mix, too – Fuzzy Mix could add drought resistance and additional fuzziness to the other characteristics, both of which would be good for a houseplant or patio plant. Also, smaller plants are better for me since I have limited space.

All the possibilities!

Finally, lest you think that I am the only mad-scientist breeder out there, I found these at the farmer’s market last week:

“I don’t know what they are,” said the vendor, “but I found them growing behind one of the labs. Want some? No one’s died yet…”

No, seriously. They’re pometrons. A cross between a pomelo and a citron. Apparently they’re mostly skin, like a citron, but the interior flesh is edible, like a pomelo. I’m going to try candying the peel. I’ve been so busy teaching my online course, though, that I haven’t had time to cut it up until today, so I have no idea what the peel tastes like. Looking forward to finding out!

Finally, I’m pleased to say that, after years of waiting, I finally have my first bergamot!

Bergamots are an ancient citrus, and the source of the special flavor of Earl Grey tea. Candied bergamot peel dipped in chocolate has been one of the signature flavors in my chocolate boxes for many years, and I made the candied bergamot peel myself. But sourcing fresh bergamots has been a huge challenge. After the third source dried up, precipitating yet another a frantic search for a new one, I lost my temper and got Mike to plant a bergamot tree. And so, three years later, I finally got my very first bergamot!

“But wait,” you say. “Didn’t you retire as a chocolatier last year?”

Well, yes. But my friend Chris is carrying on the tradition. And candied bergamot peel makes great fruitcake. I’ll find something to do with it, dammit – the stuff is delicious. And now I have my very own source!