At the age of 54, gardening for 30 yrs...and tried my first Big Boy today!

[Fusion_power]

Jeez, I guess I'll have to toss these seed I have where I crossed Goliath X Brandywine and Omar's Lebanese X Zogola. I was gonna grow:

Goliath Brandywine
and
Omar's Zogola

DarJones

[TomatoDon]

BTW Dar...your Purple Haze did fine here.

[BigdaddyJ]

I think the two best hybrids I have ever grown would be Brandy Boy and Big Beef in that order. I have tried most of the Big and Better Beefy Boys and Girls, whoppers and goliaths etc over the years and those two are the best of the easily available and common hybrids IMO. BTW, miss you on FB Craig...

[eyolf]

Sorry, Craig...I only look in about 2 or 3 times a month. The Tomatoe-bug-bite hasn't gone away, but I am not quite as struck by it; Only about an acre of tomatoe plants this year.

7 years ago, I grew out both Big- and Better Boy, saved seeds and planted about 80 each of the F2's. Of the Better Boy, I saw a meager amount of variation, mostly in size and DTM, and not a one big Pink. Big Boy yielded one large Pink Beefsteak, and that one was almost missed. My Bro-in-law had a tomatoe crop failure and picked about 6 bushels for canning...most came from the end of the tomatoe field that held my experiments.

In any case, I salvaged seeds from one immense, rotting, squirrel-bitten fruit, identifying it by the clear skin more than the deeper coloration. From that one fruit I saw a great deal of variation in the F3 generation, and from those variants I have worked at selecting out 3 lines:

1) a typical large, unkempt, rampant pink indeterminate beefsteak. For now, I've been calling this "Teddy's Boy F4-5-6" etc.

2) a really lovely, delicious pink globe about the same as Better Boy, only pink. I'm just calling this Teddy Smooth (no Beefsteak ribs) I actually like this variation best.

3) a medium globose red something like a few depression-era favorites. I have my suspicions where these genes came from, but I'm not going to embarass myself by suggesting I might know what the other parent of Big Boy was when I do not. BUt some research has indicated that many of these old favorites shared a parent, grandparent, etc., so I'm reinventing the wheel with it anyway. Its a lot like the Canadian variety Pollock, but a little larger and later...Pollock also can claim one or more of those turn-of-the 2oth century parents!

[TomatoDon]

How many tomatoes did you plant in that one acre?

[eyolf]

This year its 697; room for more, but also growing squash to eat, and Pumpkins for a church fundraiser...they use a lot of space!