Uprising Seeds

There are people and places that will carry on in our hearts long after wonderful visits.
A warm thank you and group hug to:
The folks for showering us with inspiration, seeds, and a cookie and tea filled welcome. They have been doing community minded seed work and spreading their passion since 1986!
for their warm friendship, meandering conversations, and a heart filled vegan Palestinian meal. for extending love and care in their wake, and taking us to magical avocado and citrus filled greenhouses.
for said greenhouses and sharing of incredible knowledge, love, enthusiasm, and dedication to healthy systems and regenerative agriculture.
The entire family for sharing their land and dreams.

All our love and thanks.
We can’t wait to return❤️

We’re going to lose some people here, but in the interest of honesty and transparency, we buy tomatoes from the supermarket in winter. Feel free to hit the unfollow button right now. The reason in our house is pretty singular: pico di gallo. We just can’t get behind cooked salsa and tacos are enough a part of our diet that a simple fresh pico is critical cuisine year round. Our expectations are low. You’d be pushing it to plan a winter meal with tomatoes as the centerpiece, save that for September when main season slicers are prime time. Winter tomatoes, for us, are a supporting and structural element as much as anything, all about acic pop, firm toothsome flesh with a juicy gel cavity, and the flavor to pull the structural elements together. No version of preserving main season tomatoes really satisfies that same role.
Enter longkeepers: If youre not yet faimilar with longkeeping tomatoes, they are tomatoes bred for their storage qualities, grown during the main season, picked mostly barely the near-side of ripe, and either hung in something comparable to a pepper ristra, or stored in shallow boxes/crates with good airflow. If picked and stored in proper conditions, they go into something of a vegetable stasis and store for months. The two centers of biodiversity for the type seem to be southern Italy and eastern Spain, where they have been used to extend fresh tomato season into the winter months for generations. While many of the old varieties have fallen out of favor in this era of modern preserving and and export based food distribution, they have found a welcome home on our farm for their ability to extend fresh tomato season without requiring the fossil fuel miles (and with honestly a way better end product than what’s available from the market).
Now, IG loves it some beautiful hanging fruits (remember when hoshigaki had a hot IG moment?), but longkeeper tomatoes can also hang with real life. We had a couple totes, with tomatoes picked in late September, rattling around the back of my covered farm truck bed for months, through lots of varying temps and commuting miles, and we were eating fresh tomatoes till the new year. (Continued in comments)