My historical society has a new program - heirloom seeds - join, receive seed packets promise to return seeds from your harvest. She is offering cooking classes and other seminars as well on various topics. It ha been very successful.

The master gardeners in my area have an heirloom tomato society that every August shares the tomatoes they have grown. There is tomato tastings and they offer tastings of recipes they've made from the homegrown heirloom tomatoes.

I planted red and yellow currant heirloom tomatoes this year. I really liked the yellow but the red got larger than I expected, more like a cherry tomato. A master gardener told me that the heirloom seeds can often run back to older plant stock or even mix with the other types of tomatoes in the garden.

Has anyone else heard of this or had it happen?

Mary-Anne Durkee (our Thai Editor) is a master gardener & plants over 100+ species of various tomatoes regularly over the years! She is very knowledgeable & has lots of experience. She belongs to a lot of groups/societies as well.

@Sandra: feel free to email Mary-Anne, she will know for sure :-)

Thanks Sadhana. I'll email her.

We recently went to a Self-Reliance Expo and learned the importance of heirloom seeds. Our fall garden, our first, is all heirloom seeds and I am going to try and save seeds this time too and see how it goes.

I love the renaissance of heirloom seeds and gardening! I grow heirloom tomatoes. I recently heard there are over 60 species of broccoli, but we really only ever see 3 or so in the markets. There is an apple farm near me that grows 50 types and they are amazing in their differences. Michael Pollan talked about that in The Botany of Desire - about all the different species of apples, cherries, potatoes and corn. That is awesome that your historical society has an heirloom seed program - I will have to search for something like that in my area.