Coldspring Farm & Ranch

Just gotta give a quick thumbs up to one of my favorite farm and ranch stores in Coldspring. While our family has for years come here for a lot of our gardening and feed needs, as the prices can’t be beat, this year I found some treasures on the porch.
Organic gardening is not easy, and I am a firm believer that if you are going to go to the trouble, you should just go all the way and grow heirlooms. For those that do not know, heirlooms are plants and food that have been saved by seed savers from times past. For example, 100 years ago, tomatoes tasted delicious.
The problem with store bought tomatoes today is that they are grown for disease resistance, tuff skins for shipping durability and shelf live. It used to be that tomatoes were grown for flavor, and today, to get something that delicious, you usually have to grow it yourself. You can get a wide variety of heirloom seeds on the Internet, if you have the time and patience to start from seeds, or you can find some plants, but with shipping, that’s an expensive route.
So, back to Coldspring Farm & Ranch, and the «treasures» I found on the porch this year. –3– Heirloom Tomato plant varieties! I could not believe my eyes. They (are currently) stocking the Black Krim Tomato (the most delicious one I have ever eaten in my life) in quart containers. You will never find those in stores or farmers markets. They also have what is called a Mr. Stripy Orange and Pink striped heirloom. And finally they have the Italian Tree tomato tree that grows to 25 feet tall and produces tomatoes up to 2 pound each. I bought 5 Black Krims, 2 Mr. Stripeys, and one Italian tree, and got them all planted yesterday. These should produce an interesting and delicious crop, and thanks to being able to get such rare food plants locally without the massive shipping fees normally seen when trying to locate plants this rare, I started my gourmet tomato garden for under $ 20. It should produce over 200 pounds of (delicious) tomatoes in the next 90 – 120 days.
Thumbs up!