desktop wallmater; wild boar farms; yipes stripes!

my current wallpaper is a big rainbow tomato i grew last year. i’m fiending for homegrown tomatoes and it’s not even march yet.

here’s the full-res file of that photo, in case anyone else wants to drool every time they turn on their computer. right-click and “save image as.”

last year i was mostly interested in oddly-colored tomatoes--blacks, browns, purples, greens, yellows, oranges, whites. i tried to grow a wide variety of colors, shapes and sizes, and that was a success that i’m hoping to replicate this season, but with a new wrinkle: stripes.

i’m passionately in love with striped tomatoes, all of a sudden.

as i’ve been searching out the neatest stripey mater friends, one place keeps coming up: wild boar farms. they do some far-out work with tomato genetics, stabilizing their heirloom-derived garden freaks and mutants into open-pollinates.

so far i’ve decided to grow black and brown boar:

berkeley tie-dye (“warning, high acid content may cause flashbacks”):

and michael pollan!

i love that they named a tomato after michael pollan. it’s an open-pollanate! i’m taking small, slow bites out of his book “second nature” right now...trying to make it last because i love it so much...it’s comforting me through the restlessness that comes at the end of winter, just like “animal, vegetable, miracle” helped me through early spring last year.

anyway, hooray for stripes! i’m also growing striped roman, green zebra, and possibly some red zebra too. who knows, maybe my zebras will produce some freaks that i can stabilize--those varieties seem to be where a lot of the wild boar mutations originated.

this one isn’t striped, but, it’s pretty exciting nonetheless...i’m going to grow reisetomate!