2009 Surprises

[dice]

Originally Posted by dice

Like Tania says, this is likely a seed mixup if these are indeed
all PL. (A chance F1 cross from an RL parent would still be RL,
and the grower would usually have noticed the difference in
the plants or fruit when saving seeds.)

Actually there is one situation where chance PL F2 plants from
a stable RL cultivar routinely show up in trades, which is when
someone grows a single plant of some RL cultivar that they
have not grown before and then saves seeds. The leaves on
an F1 cross of that cultivar with some unknown PL cultivar are
still RL, and the F1 fruit may be close enough to the description
of the stable OP fruit that a grower who has not grown it before
is not aware that it is different from the original.

(Then they wonder just how they got a PL plant the next year
from seeds saved from an RL plant the year before that was
supposedly a stable OP cultivar. There are only two answers:
seed mixup or the RL plant that they grew had sprouted from
an already crossed seed.)

This is not as likely when growing multiple plants of
something from the same seed packet, because there will
usually be seeds of both the cross and the uncrossed original
among the seeds in the packet. The differences between plants
or fruit that are supposed to be the same alerts the grower that
something odd is going on with their seeds of that tomato
variety.