Happy Birthday to Donna the Gardener

I save these seeds every year.

Radiator Charlie and the story of his Mortgage Lifter tomatoes.

Sometime in the early 40s, Radiator Charlie Byles wanted to build a better tomato. You remember this is a story about a tomato, right? Well, this is how he did it.

BYLES: What I did I took ten plants and put them in a circle and put one in the center.

YOUNG: McCormack has studied this part of the tape carefully and says Byles invented an unorthodox but elegant system.

McCORMACK: Well, he started with four varieties of tomatoes and he placed a tomato called German Johnson in the center of a ring of 10 tomatoes. All these tomatoes were the largest seeds he could find in the country at the time. So, he would go around to the other tomatoes, collect pollen in the baby’s ear syringe, then squirt it on the flowers of the German Johnson. Then he would save seed. After seven years, he felt he had a stable tomato with all qualities he was looking for, and once he was satisfied with that he never worked with any other tomato plants, did any other plant breeding. But he really ran with it after he developed it.

YOUNG: Ran all the way to the bank. Turns out Radiator Charlie Byles had quite a knack for marketing, and sold tomato seedlings for a buck apiece—a lot of money for a little plant in those days. He sold enough of them to pay off the mortgage on his house.

BYLES: I didn’t pay but six thousand dollars for my home, and paid most of it off with tomato plants.

Wikipedia has an article disputing the Byles story, crediting the cultivar to William Estler in 1922.  Facts are hazy.

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And I've included seeds of:

 

Elephant amaranth (Amaranthus gangeticus) is an eye-catching annual that can brighten your vegetable garden. You use its leaves as you would spinach and its seeds as a cereal-like grain that can be milled into a gluten-free flour, among other uses. The 3- to 5-foot plants are ready to harvest as seed approximately 90 days after planting. Each upright, lumpy red flower head develops into thousands of seeds. Mature plants produce upwards of 50,000 seeds -- plenty to eat or plant.

I grow them every year because they are gorgeous.  I've never eaten either the leaves or the seeds.  My brother Dennis gave me seeds from his garden more than 30 years ago and I've saved them every year -- there are always more than enough to share.  To little kids we say they look like an elephant head with trunk.  But some of us think it looks like a giant hand giving passersby the finger,  My friend Joan calls it the Elip-Off Flower.  They reseed like poppies do.   Scatter seed, lightly cover, keep moist until up.  They like sun and get about 3 feet tall.  I put four or five of the plants in a large pot and cover round the outside with lobelia and marigolds.

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