Market Farming

[Art Petrzelka <art AT complum.com>]

On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 08:42, Petersons wrote:
> have (maybe Buffalo), are all ripening now.  Taxi and Amana orange 

I found out something interesting about the Amana tomato this spring. I
bought some plants and seeds from a couple in South Amana who are the
local seed savers. They told me that what is sold in the catalogs as
"Amana" tomato was bred by a professor from "out East". He had eaten at
one of the Amana restaraunts and wanted seeds for the tomatoes because
he like them so much. Of course, they turned him down, as Amana is a
very closed society. So he went back East and bred a tomato that was as
close as he could remember to what he had eaten out here. I suspect he
was from Cornell.

I have a late tomato that I got from these folks, but it isn't the Amana
tomato, it's a late variety. They don't distribute that tomato for some
reason. Just for perspective, my great-grandfather worked for Amana
Society when he came over here in the 1870s, and we still aren't
considered part of them. You have to know that they were a German
religious commune set up in the European fashion: small villages
surrounded by farmland. Nobody lived in the country, so they were more
isolated, by choice. We are the first place north of them, just 2 miles
away. And we wouldn't have an Amana address if it was up to them instead
of the Post Office.

So, what you have isn't an heirloom, by strict standards. It must be a
good tomato, though. But the name is a marketing creation, not a
reality.
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Art Petrzelka
Amana, Iowa, USA