Tomato named "Blueberry"

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by linzelu100

It is possible to breed a good tasting blue tomato, right? In Carolyn's book it talks about crossing tomatoes to get the traits you want. This can be done with blues right? They wouldn't be any different. I have never done this, but certainly someone probably is with a blue tomato, right? Are they just so new that there hasn't been enough time to do so?

Lindsey

Yes, there's a veryshort section in my book about doing directed crosses to hopefully get what you might like as well as short discussions of making selections from F1 hybrids whether from directed corsses or accidental crosses or from known F1 hybrids,

But it isn't as simple as that.

One can cross two varieties with excellent taste, get the F1, save F2 seeds, and from those seeds get some lousy tasting fruits.

It's all about genetic segregation and here's an excellent link where how to make crosses, illustrations of what genetic segregation is about, how long it takes to dehybridize a hybrid and so much more:

http://www.kdcomm.net/~tomato/

You can start by clicking on Culturee but there's hours of
interesting material at that site as well as links to many other sites.

Eventually somone will come up with a good tasting blue, but if you ever tasted the initial OSU Blue and the P20 selection from that I think you'd realize that neither is good tasting, so trying to find the right other varieties to cross with is difficult.

I could make a list here of the many folks I know who are working with the blues, and they know what they're doing, but I think it's always good to remember that Dr.Myer's impetus in developing OSU originally was as, one might say a dietary supplement,and NOT a novelty variety to be grown as such.

Carolyn