Tomato Tasting

Save the Date, Saturday, September 7

Back by popular demand Seed Savers Exchange is pleased to announce the return of the tomato-tasting event. Celebrate the joy and benefits of crop biodiversity and vote for your favorite tomato.

Workshop Schedule

1:00 PM—Processing and Saving Tomato Seeds with Alan Kissinger, greenhouse coordinator, and guest farmer Peg Davis. Peg’s flagship tomato ‘Peg O’ My Heart’ will be part of this year’s tomato-tasting event.

2:00 PM—Tomato Growing Techniques. Join Kate Rowe and Sydney Weldon, the SSE evaluation team, to learn how to confidently grow and evaluate your homegrown tomatoes. This workshop will cover seed sourcing and variety selection, transplanting, fertilizing, and maintaining your plants in the garden. Experience a selection of tomato varieties growing at Heritage Farm this season with a walk through the Evaluation Garden. Learn to see your tomatoes differently with hands-on measurements like BRIX and pH, and get a behind-the-scenes look at what it means to evaluate tomatoes at SSE.

3:00 PM—Cooking demonstration.

4:00 PM—Winners of the 2024 tomato-tasting event announced.

Workshop Leaders

Alan Kissinger is the greenhouse coordinator at Seed Savers Exchange. His adventures in horticulture have taken him from his hometown in Ohio to Michigan, Pennsylvania, New York, and now Iowa. More than his fascination with plants and their inextricable roles in our lives, his work is motivated by sharing with and learning from others. He finds delight in the small mysteries of life including thunderstorms, the scent of fall, and a perfect cinnamon roll.

For over three decades Peg Davis, the small-scale farmer of Staunton in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, has earned quite a reputation in her community for her passionate dedication to growing and selling exceptional produce at Staunton’s farmer’s market. Peg’s specialty is heirloom tomatoes.

Peg holds a BS in agriculture education, BA in English, MFA in ceramics, and MFA in Poetry. She became one of the first female agriculture teachers in the state of Virginia. She jokes that while “at the farmer’s market, I tell people, yep, four college degrees, and I grew up to be a street vendor which is what I love to do.”

Her flagship tomato variety–the ‘Peg O’ My Heart’–will be part of this year’s lineup at the Seed Savers Exchange tomato tasting event.

Kate Rowe, Seed Savers Exchange evaluation manager, began farming near Chicago after earning her graduate degree from Savannah College of Art and Design and serving in AmeriCorps. Later, Kate moved to the East Coast, where she started a restaurant farm, managed a CSA farm, worked on small-scale dairies, made cheese, and eventually ran her own small farm in the Hudson Valley of New York. As the SSE Evaluation Manager, Kate is responsible for growing out, evaluating, and collecting data from select varieties in the SSE seed collection, coordinating trials for the Collection to Catalog initiative, and running the community science ADAPT program. When she is not working, Kate loves to cook, spend time with her family and friends, and hang out with her dog, Ollie.

Sydney Weldon (she/they) is the evaluation technician at Seed Savers Exchange in Decorah, Iowa, where she grows and evaluates several hundred varieties of heirloom, open-pollinated fruits, vegetables, and flowers each season. After hours, she enjoys tending her cut flower garden, learning how to sew clothes, and snuggling her two foster cats.

Thank you to our event sponsor,