{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Food Garden Life Show: Helping You Harvest More from Your Edible Garden, Vegetable Garden, and Edible Landscaping","title":"Tasty Tomatoes for Small Spaces","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1981,"description":"We’re joined by tomato expert Craig LeHoullier to talk about the Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project, preserving seed varieties, and to find out what’s new in his garden.\nLeHoullier, an avid seed saver with a passion for saving and sharing heirloom tomato varieties, says that his seed collection contains somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 seed packets.\nDwarf Tomato Breeding Project\nThe project began in 2004. LeHoullier was getting a lot of questions about compact varieties at his annual tomato-plant sale.\nHe explains that dwarf tomato varieties, which grow vertically at approximately half the rate of other indeterminate tomato varieties, already existed at the time. But these dwarf varieties were obscure and hard to find.\nHe teamed up with a friend in Australia to start breeding new dwarf tomato varieties. That initiative soon grew into an open source, volunteer-run, worldwide breeding project. The goal was to breed stable, open-pollinated, dwarf tomato varieties from which gardeners could save their own seed.\nThe project began releasing dwarf tomato varieties to seed companies in 2010.\nBy 2020, 135 varieties had been released.","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/_y3e1k24nMlKLGYUZdhBsMgezF6u9k_5w92OUmAhniI/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kMTFk/NDg3ODQxNjE2MGM1/ZWMwNGVhOTgyZTY1/NmZhOC5qcGc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}