Seed Stewardship at the Giving Garden

Throughout Spring 2023, the Giving Garden served as a teaching site for our local seed stewards, Working Food, to observe a newly hybridized tomato in action. We are grateful to Working Food for donating seeds to us on a regular basis, and most of our seeds come from them! This allows for us to grow resilient, climate-adapted crops that enable us to successfully grow organically for producing nutrient-dense food. While our friends at Working Food have been able to observe many other crops grown at our farm, like the numerous varieties of collards we grow, we decided to dial in our energies on the “Evvy Tomato Project” this season. After planting transplanted tomatoes from Working Food’s greenhouse, we’ve worked with our seed stewards to grow, observe, and document the tomatoes’ progress. In the words of their “SeedEO”, Melissa DeSa: “The goal is to create a new variety that is great tasting and able to withstand the extremes of Florida’s growing conditions, but on a more compact dwarf-statured plant with bigger fruit.” Working Food had an ambitious idea: what would happen if they tried to combine the beloved Everglades currant tomato with a dwarf variety, Tanunda Red? Since 2015, Working Food has partnered with different growers to establish a tomato birthed from these two parent varieties. We had fun collaborating with our seed stewards to help to develop a new tomato variety, and to contribute to strengthened local seed sovereignty. Read the full story on Working Food’s blog!