Tasty Tomatoes for Small Spaces: The Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project

Craig LeHoullier, author of the book Epic Tomatoes and one of the founders of the Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project

We’re joined by tomato expert Craig LeHoullier to talk about the Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project, preserving seed varieties, and to find out what’s new in his garden.

LeHoullier, an avid seed saver with a passion for saving and sharing heirloom tomato varieties, says that his seed collection contains somewhere between 50,000 and 70,000 seed packets.

Dwarf Tomato Breeding Project

The project began in 2004. LeHoullier was getting a lot of questions about compact varieties at his annual tomato-plant sale.

He explains that dwarf tomato varieties, which grow vertically at approximately half the rate of other indeterminate tomato varieties, already existed at the time. But these dwarf varieties were obscure and hard to find.

He teamed up with a friend in Australia to start breeding new dwarf tomato varieties. That initiative soon grew into an open source, volunteer-run, worldwide breeding project. The goal was to breed stable, open-pollinated, dwarf tomato varieties from which gardeners could save their own seed.

The project began releasing dwarf tomato varieties to seed companies in 2010.

By 2020, 135 varieties had been released. And the project continues!