On Tomatoes And Peppers

The last few years, I’ve been growing Cherokee Purple heirloom tomato plants in my little backyard raised garden. Started the plants from seeds each year. This year, I planted the seeds on Jan. 1 and, a month later, I have 30 or so little seedlings growing under a grow light in a shed.
I check on them every day, sometimes two or three times a day.
Over the last year, I began making homemade hot sauce from peppers I grew on a couple of little, nondescript pepper plants I picked up somewhere.
This year, I decided to modify my hot sauce making practices by getting seeds to grow what I hope will be better hot peppers for my bottling activities.
I looked around for something unusual and came upon a number of organizations that are involved in insuring that food plants from around the world don’t go extinct.
These organizations have collected seeds from millions of plants from around the world and are storing them for future use. They continue to produce more seeds and, to finance their efforts, they sell small quantities of seeds each year.
I looked over an exhaustive number of descriptions of unusual pepper plants from around the world and finally settled on Haskorea Hot Pepper seeds collected from Aleppo, Syria.
Aleppo, I learned, is (was) known for its exotic peppers. But growing peppers is a difficult task these days in Syria because of the devastation that has occurred there over years of revolutionary warfare.
An American who traded for the first Haskorea seeds there did so while walking through a market in downtown Aleppo.
Today, that market doesn’t exist. Nor does the street on which it was located. Such a buying trip in Aleppo these days is impossible