Episode four of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast

This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it.

In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren talks with Patrina Nuske Small and Craig LeHoullier about the Dwarf Tomato Project, a collaborative, all-volunteer tomato breeding project. We discuss how the project came about, the benefits and challenges of having an all-volunteer team, and the pleasant surprises of plant breeding.

Patrina Nuske Small; 'Uluru Ochre'

Craig LeHoullier; 'Dwarf Sweet Sue' (photo credit: Paul Fish)

Episode links

- To learn more about the Dwarf Tomato Project and find information about buying seeds of the dwarf tomato varieties that have come out of the project, check out the project's website: https://www.dwarftomatoproject.net/ - Craig LeHoullier's website: https://www.craiglehoullier.com/dwarf-tomato-breeding-project- Seed Savers’ Exchange: https://www.seedsavers.org/- Tomatoville Gardening Forums: http://tomatoville.com/

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Free the Seed!Transcript for S2E4: The Dwarf Tomato Project

Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode four of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren.

In this episode, I talk with Craig LeHoullier and Patrina Nuske Small, the co-creators of the Dwarf Tomato Project, the “first all-volunteer world-wide tomato breeding project in documented gardening history”.  We discuss how the project came about, the benefits and challenges of having an all-volunteer team, and the pleasant surprises of plant breeding.

Patrina Nuske Small began gardening in her 50's after graduating from Flinders University in South Australia, realizing that it was time to get away from research and spend more time outside in the fresh air. Patrina is currently based in New South Wales.

Dr. Craig LeHoullier followed a 25 year career in pharmaceuticals with an ongoing writing career that includes Epic Tomatoes and Growing Vegetables in Straw Bales. He maintained a parallel obsession with gardening, first with heirloom tomatoes, then with amateur breeding. Craig joined Seed Savers Exchange in 1986, and serves as an adviser to the Exchange for tomatoes. Craig is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Rachel Hultengren: Patrina, Craig, welcome to the show!

Patrina Nuske Small: Thanks, Rachel!

Craig LeHoullier: Thank you very much, Rachel – it’s an absolute delight to be able to do this today.

Rachel Hultengren: Craig, maybe you can start by briefly telling us about the Dwarf Tomato Project. What is the project, and what are its goals?

Craig LeHoullier: The project is huge, fascinating, endlessly surprising. To put it all in a sentence, the goal of the Dwarf Tomato breeding project was to offer to the gardening community the largest possible selection of interesting, delicious tomato plants that can be grown by space-challenged gardeners, while at the same time provide a fascinating project for those wishing to become involved in to experience. And in that respect, I think we haven’t only checked all the boxes we set out to check, but we’ve checked boxes that we never thought we were going to check.

Rachel Hultengren: Patrina, how did the project get started, and when did it get started?

Patrina Nuske Small: In 2005, I was searching the internet for gardening information because I really needed to, like I say, get outside in the fresh air and get away from books.