Taking tomato improvement to the masses

It’s basically your standard I-found-redemption-in-a-tomato-heirloom story:

Another life somewhere in the pastoral wilds of Co Kilkenny, in a summer long ago, the wife of a Finnish jewellerymaker brought slices of tomato to the lunch table: slices a centimetre thick, a hand’s breadth across, jewel-bright with olive oil and scattered with chopped green basil. This simple revelation of what tomatoes should be, enfolded in mouthfuls of sweetness and scent, set my early hankering for the good life.

But this piece in the Irish Times did teach me something for a change. It taught me there’s something called the EU-Sol project “to improve the quality of the tomatoes and potatoes we eat.” But there’s more to it than that: check out the bits of its website aimed at the general public and schools.

Harvesting the bounty of weedy greens

That’s Violet, my sister-in-law. She’s harvesting weedy indigenous leafy greens from her (and my) mother-in-law’s farm at Gataka, near Limuru in Kenya. And talking to me about these interesting species at the same time. She’s mainly picking “terere” (Amaranthus hybridus), though she mentions “togotia” (Erucastrum arabicum) towards the end. Also “kahorora,” or pumpkin leaves, though of course that’s not a weedy species. Thanks, Violet.