This grew out of a talk I had the opportunity to give to Novella Carpenter’s Urban Agriculture class at University of San Francisco in 2026.

I was inspired for a title by this article authored by Dani Zamir, a big deal in the world of plant breeding, real plant breeding, not just amateur breeding like me.

But even at my level, it’s an art and a science. It’s an art because it is a creative expression, I am guided by intuition and joy and curiosity and beauty. And it’s a science because of the feedback process of taking careful notes, trying specific experiments to see what will happen, learning more to be able to guess what might happen and then comparing to the actual results to reflect on the validity of the assumptions.

I follow the footsteps in my artistry of my mom, natural perfumer and alchemist Mandy Aftel, as well as those of Gregor Mendel, of Charles Darwin, and of Charles Rick, Tom Wagner, Craig LeHoullier, Brad Gates, Fred Hempel, Karen Olivier, Bill Yoder, and the so many others working to make beautiful, tasty, healthful, adaptive tomatoes.