Heirloom by OP

[Farmer Matt]

HI everyone, what happens when you plant OP & Heirloom tomatos by each other.

Thanks.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by Farmer Matt

HI everyone, what happens when you plant OP & Heirloom tomatos by each other.

Thanks.

All heirloom varieties are OP, but not all OP's are heirloom varieties.

So nothing happens other than the possibility of cross pollination which can happen between any two varieties if blossoms are not bagged which is a concern if you're a seed saver.

[Wi-sunflower]

if blossoms are not bagged which is a concern if you're a seed saver

I would like to qualify that statement with "if the plants are close together".

I don't bag blossoms at all but I have had very little crossing. BUT I don't plant my tomatoes in close beds where the plants can grow into each other. I plant in rows with each plant aprox 3-4 ft apart. The rows are about 6-8 ft apart. I plant a flat of 24 plants / variety if I have that many plants. I try to leave extra length open between varieties to allow for the name stakes and so the varieties don't grow together. I will often tell my picking crew to leave the fruit from the first and last plant in a variety if they DO get to mingling.

Just my methods and experiences,
Carol

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by Wi-sunflower

if blossoms are not bagged which is a concern if you're a seed saver

I would like to qualify that statement with "if the plants are close together".

I don't bag blossoms at all but I have had very little crossing. BUT I don't plant my tomatoes in close beds where the plants can grow into each other. I plant in rows with each plant aprox 3-4 ft apart. The rows are about 6-8 ft apart. I plant a flat of 24 plants / variety if I have that many plants. I try to leave extra length open between varieties to allow for the name stakes and so the varieties don't grow together. I will often tell my picking crew to leave the fruit from the first and last plant in a variety if they DO get to mingling.

Just my methods and experiences,
Carol

Carol, I could also have written about geographic isolation, but didn't. I have never bagged blossoms myself. And I used to grow my tomatoes in rows 250 ft long, plants within the rows 3-4 ft apart and rows about 5 ft apart and my X pollination usually ran about 5% meaning that out of seeds saved from 100 varieties that on average about 5 will be X pollinated.

But insect pollinators, mainly Halictid bees, the tiny ones called Sweat bees, are the most abundant ones in most places and most active either early or late in the season which determines when fruits should be used for seeds. For me late in the season was best.

I'm not going to get into the whole area of X pollination but I would refer folks to two places.

Go to gardenweb.com to the Growing Tomatoes Forum, click on the blue FAQ link at the top of the page and scroll down to an excellent article on how to prevent cross pollination, with pictures.

And I'd follow that up with the excellent article on NCP ( natural cross pollination) written by Dr. Jeff McCormack , the former owner of SESE but the article is still there.

http://www.southernexposure.com/isol...omatoes.p.html

Hope that helps, and I do find Jeff's isolation distances to be on the conservative side, but then he was at that time producing seed for his own commercial site and had a very strong interest in producing pure seed for commercial purposes.

[bcday]

Carol, the amount of space you're allowing won't prevent crossing. Cross-pollination is caused by bees visiting one blossom and carrying its pollen to another blossom. Tomato plants can't cross-pollinate simply by growing into each other.

The two plants that get cross-pollinated don't have to be next to each other or even in the same garden. It all depends on which plants happen to have blossoms open at the same time and where the bee decides to go next, and whether that blossom has already self-pollenized before the bee finds it. Usually tomato blossoms do self-pollenize before they are open far enough to be attractive to bees. But if you want to be 100% certain, you have to isolate the blossoms by bagging or by planting them farther away from each other than the bees can fly -- that's more than 6-8 feet, LOL.

Your low crossing rate is likely due to having many plants of each variety and saving seeds from several fruits from each of those plants. If a bee did happen to bring pollen from a different variety to a blossom that wasn't already self-pollenized, it's still only one fruit out of many and a few seeds out of thousands.

Farmer Matt, I'm not sure what you meant by your question. As Carolyn said, all heirloom varieties are OP. If you plant an heirloom variety next to a variety that is also OP but perhaps hasn't been around long enough to be called an "heirloom", they will both produce plants and fruit that conform to their respective varieties. If any cross-pollination occurs between them, it won't affect the fruit for that year. It would only result in hybrid seeds and wouldn't show up until the seeds grow into plants themselves.

[Wi-sunflower]

Yes I know I'm not growing up to commercial company standards of isolation.

But I don't think we have as many of those "sweat bees" as we used to when I was a kid either. Bees in general have taken a hit in my area the last few years.

Carol

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by Wi-sunflower

Yes I know I'm not growing up to commercial company standards of isolation.

But I don't think we have as many of those "sweat bees" as we used to when I was a kid either. Bees in general have taken a hit in my area the last few years.

Carol

Carol, I don't think it's as much growing to commercial standards b/c there are none. Which is why there's not one place I know of that sells OP seed that has a perfect record as to seed purity.

It's for anyone growing tomatoes who wants to save seed, whether for home use, trading , listing in the SSE YEarbook, whatever. With my listings in the Yearbook I clearly state that the seeds are from unbagged fruits.

And to kind of reinforce what bcday said above, there have been times that I've had maybe 1000 seeds of a variety and it wasn't until way over about 500 were distributed that an off type showed up. Not a stray seed b'c when I pack tomato seeds I only have on the table one opened pack of seeds at a time.

And b'c of the above I encourage folks who don't bag blossoms to never ever save seeds from just one fruit on a plant, better for many fruits on one plants, better yet many fruits from two plants, well you get the drift. LOL That way one dilutes out any X pollinated seeds that might be present.

In my seed offer here last year one person got one offtype of Serdste Buivola and the other seeds sowed were fine, as was apparently true for those others here who requested it as well as the SSE members who requested it through the Yearbook.

Bees have been known to fly up to two miles, I guess that's a one way trip, but I didn't check. Being raised on a farm and up close and personal with tomatoes since I was a wee kid I never even saw those sweat bees, didn't know they existed, I only saw the larger bees occasionally working the blooms,. which they do for proten since tomato blossoms don't have nectar.

I think it was only about 10 years ago that I found out about Halictid bees and I never ever went out to my tomato field got down low and even tried to see them.