Silly Question

[mikemansker]

I know I have way too much time on my hands to be thinking about this:

You can buy open pollinated or hybrid tomato seeds.

I think that if you grow the OP variety and save seeds and plant them the next year, you are going to get a tomato with the same traits as the parent.

When you plant hybrid seeds, you get the tomatoes represented by the hybrid, bearing the characteristics of the parent tomatoes used to create the hybrid and, if you save seed from the resulting tomatoes, they do not produce true replicas of the hybrid planted. This brings me to my silly question.

I assume that a hybrid like Big Beef is grown in great quantities throughout the country, or you could substitute any other popular hybrid you want. Where do all of those hybrid seeds come from? Growers can't be saving seeds from the hybrid, so they must be crossing the parents every year to get the seeds. Right?

I see terms like F1, etc. which seem to represent the first growing, F2 would represent a second season of growing? If this is the case, when you get to F26 or whatever and keep getting the tomato you want (stable), wouldn't the tomato cease to be a hybrid and become an OP?

Just my ramblings. Please set me straight.

[AlittleSalt]

Yes. I planted some Brandy Boy F11 seeds last Sunday. They are considered OP or de-hybridized. http://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Brandy_Boy

[dmforcier]

Okay, I think I've got some of this straight, but a couple of your silly questions I'm waiting to hear the answers to, also.

To me "OP" means Open Pollinated. Why that would be a counterpoint to "hybrid" or a synonym for 'stable' I don't get yet. Now, a stable variety will breed true so long as the flower is not cross-pollinated. As I understand it, tomatoes are like peppers in that they mostly self-pollinate, so stable varieties will mostly breed true. (Or if isolated from other varieties, will always breed true.)

As for depth of generation, the generally accepted number is F9. If you can get at least some plants of the line to remain true through generation 9, the variety can be considered stable. (There may be more to it than that; I'm still learning.)

Let me add a corollary silly question. 'Hybrid' seems to be equated to 'unstable' in that it will not breed true. Is that correct?

[Cole_Robbie]

Growers can't be saving seeds from the hybrid, so they must be crossing the parents every year to get the seeds. Right?

Commercial production of hybrid seed is highly labor-intensive, and thus occurs in areas of the world that offer cheap labor, such as China and Mexico. Even if you wanted to do it yourself, the parent lines are trade secrets. Some hybrids can be stabilized into what is at least a very similar OP version, but others like Big Beef and Sungold have proven virtually impossible to stabilize.

[dmforcier]

Thanks, CR. That answers my silly question.

As for the use of the term "OP", does it signify that the seed producing generation was left to its own devices to pollinate, vs. being hand-pollinated? In other words, OP means "not intentionally hybridized"

[AlittleSalt]

DM, All I can answer is by the way I understand it. An Open Pollinated variety grows what that variety is supposed to be, and left to grow year after year without cross pollination - it should keep producing the same.

I get confused about heirlooms. I think of them as OPs that have been around for at least 50 years. Which means I'm an heirloom?

[MissS]

OP is an abbreviation for Open-pollinated. Of course all OP's must have started as a F1 hybrid whether it was intentional or not. The plants became stabilized and then were known as a stable OP variety. OP varieties need no cross-pollination. They could have had "assistance" with hand pollination in the beginning F1 generation, but no longer require it.
All hybrids sold are F1 hybrids. Meaning that they are the first generation.

[Gardeneer]

To produce any F1 seed , they have to cross the variety, that produce F1 seeds and save seeds from its fruit. There is no short cut. The work being labor intensive , the work is done where there is cheap labor, as CR mentioned.
OP/heirloom is stable if not crossed in your garden. Tomato being self compatible won't get crossed readily. I think Carolyn has mentioned that that possibility is less than 10%, unless you bag and segregate the flowers. Crossing would depend on heavy insects activity, high winds and close vicinity of the plants.
I have never got any crosses over the years, that could notice. . Having said that , I have never bagged anything.

[PaulF]

Salt: You are not an heirloom in the vegetable sense unless you are able to produce perfect replicas of yourself. So neither are you an OP.

What you are is a highly valued, one of a kind hybridized individual, or F-1 if you must be labeled. But in our world that is considered an Heirloom of a different sort. While a tomato may be improved or not with hybridization and crossing genetic material, we human hybrids take so many years between generations it takes a while to figure out if there is any improvement in the crossing process.

We can call ourselves pretty darned good F-1s.

[NarnianGarden]

The mass production of F1 seeds is something I'd like to see too. Some years ago I had the audacity to suggest that perhaps the workers eat the tomato left-overs as sauce.. tossing all those pieces into a huge pot once they've harvested the precious seeds
I wonder if the 'mother mater' tastes anything good. Has anyone here ever visited an F1 farm and had the chance to eat a hybrid mother?
I don't think I could contain myself..

[AlittleSalt]

Paul, that is very well written.

[Cole_Robbie]

Here is the web site of a Chinese seed production company. There are pics if you scroll down: http://www.jiuzhouseeds.com/www/HdCl...asp?ClassId=34

[mikemansker]

CR

That was interesting reading, but I didn't see anything about hybridizing.

I would think that hybridizing outdoors would be an impossible task, at least on a scale that would be required to produce hybrid seeds of a popular variety. I envision a large greenhouse where conditions could be controlled. I would think that each plant would have to have individual blossoms pollinated and then bagged to prevent being pollinated with its own variety. Otherwise, you would only get fruits of one parent. I assume that only a few blossoms would be left per plant to increase the size of the fruit and to ensure that the cross was correct.

I'd really love to see how this process is achieved commercially.

[carolyn137]

My name was mentioned above and I'll try to find the thread where I outlined how F1 seed is constructed and maybe since I've been offline for over a week one of you will find it since I have a lot of catching up to do.

Basically there are two lines,call them A and B,start with what you want to use,which is an OP, breed in disease tolerance,high solids,uniform ripening gene and whatever,and get to the last one,having to test at every step that what you bred in,got incorporated,

Do the same for Line B,'Then cross that also to the last in line A. But there are many who have gone to male steriles so they don't have to do crossing by hand which is very labor intensive.

The US is no longer the place where the most F1 seed is produced.

Carolyn

[NarnianGarden]

Any idea what varieties they're producing? (SunGold, Big Beef..)

Looks very impressive.