Casey Piscura’s Tomatoes
How are great open-pollinated vegetable varieties created? Through years of careful tending, a certain amount of cross-pollination, and careful selection for the plants that thrive. Casey Piscura at Wild Mountain Seeds in Carbondale, Colorado, was a master plant breeder. In our April 2024 newsletter, we shared a piece on his Sunfired Flare tomato, and we’re reprinting an updated version today as a tribute to Casey.
Casey was a part of a small collection of people developing and experimenting with a method of plant breeding known as “grex gardening” or “landracing”. Grex gardening is the other end of the spectrum from industrial F1 hybrids. “Grex” is Latin for “flock”, and refers to a population of plants that will be grown closely together and allowed to cross-pollinate naturally over several generations. What you get is a big, diverse population of plants that have crossed and re-crossed many times. Many people call a stabilized grex a “landrace.”
Historically, most plants were landraces: diverse in nature, but also stable. When you plant the seeds of a stable landrace, you know that your plants won’t be completely uniform, but they’ll fall within a predictable range. There’s resilience in that diversity. Gardeners like Joseph Lofthouse have popularized landraces in recent years as a fast track to creating new agricultural biodiversity. It’s a process that everybody can get involved with—all you need to do is save your seeds and grow them again next year! With this method, you don’t need to fear cross-pollination and obsess about purity. Diversity is the goal! Most tomatoes that Casey grew at Wild Mountain Seeds were selected from grexes and landraces he created.
This Sunfired Flare tomato is a favorite at our farmers’ market stand in Paonia; many customers come just to buy a single tomato every week. It’s one of the best-tasting tomatoes we have ever grown, it’s adapted to our high desert climate, and it’s beautiful!
Grow Casey’s Seeds
Casey’s tomato seeds are available through his seed company, Wild Mountain Seeds. They have paused order fulfillment for the time being, so in the meantime:
- Experimental Farm Network carries many of Casey’s varieties.
- Mountain Girl tomato is available from Avalon Gulley at Vibrant Earth Seed.
- Sunfired Flare tomato is available from Laura Parker at High Desert Seed.
- Mountain Miracle and Mountain Spirit tomatoes are available from Penn Parmenter at Miss Penn’s Mountain Seeds.