Indian Stripe Heart? and its elusive heartiness

[JLJ_]

Originally Posted by carolyn137

blueltyes seeds never worked out,you posted that yourself as did I.

Surely, it's the children of bluelytes' seeds that all of us who are working with seeds from your 2013 seed offer are working with.

One of the reasons that I think it's so wonderful that you got seeds from Marina is that it adds another bluelyte seed child to the IS Heart? gene pool.

I get the feeling that you believe Marina's seeds represent a "finished" Indian Stripe Heart. From what you said above, you hadn't had time to really look at post 1 -- both you and Marsha indicated not having seen the pics of Marina's fruit.

When you get a chance -- look at the shape of her mature fruit, Marsha's and my pics of mature fruit and also compare the young fruit Marina saw with the 2016 pics. From that data . . . not much difference -- heartiness in both lines, but some pretty round adult fruit -- lots of potential but not yet a producer of reliable mature adult heart shapes.

Perhaps when you have growouts done of her seed you'll find that it is a producer of all or nearly all mature heart shaped IS fruit -- which will be great, if it happens. But the "really blunt heart" concept can awfully easily blur into seeing hearts in fruit shapes that are normal for IS and ISPL, especially if IS and ISPL aren't right there for comparison.

What's always given me hope that true heart shape is in the genes of those seeds, in addition to bluelytes' original fruit pic, is that you saw hearts from your yard and said that your seed producer reported all hearts. Has to be there somewhere. (links to where you said that are in post 1, too)

But, even though you and your producer saw hearts, considering the problems with germination of the 2013 seed offer seeds resulting from that 2012 'hearty' production -- there has to be a complication somewhere. Perhaps there's a correlation in these tomatoes between production of good mature hearts and poor seed formation -- maybe something that could be selected against to get a bluelytes type "real heart" producing plant. No way to tell but to plant seeds, evaluate them objectively (not wishfully) and go from there. It would be easier if hearts weren't fashionable -- less inclination to see hearts where there's just . . . nice IS tomatoes.

But the clear heart shaped baby fruit is an observable factor that is not in IS (except rarely), so it might really be a help in locating the heartiest parent plants -- especially paired with observations of hearty baby hearts fattening into forms nearer standard IS as they mature.

Anyway it will be interesting to see what happens when you grow out the seed, and meantime, if you look at the pics-data we have, I think you'll see why I don't think we have evidence of a reliable IS Heart as yet.