When were Green When Ripe tomatoes first invented?

[maf]

I can find references to Evergreen dating back to a 1956 Glecklers catalogue. Is this the first introduction of a green tomato or were GWR varieties known before this?

(P.S. Not sure if this question should be in General Discussion or Legacy of Yesteryear Varieties, please move if necessary.)

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by maf

I can find references to Evergreen dating back to a 1956 Glecklers catalogue. Is this the first introduction of a green tomato or were GWR varieties known before this?

(P.S. Not sure if this question should be in General Discussion or Legacy of Yesteryear Varieties, please move if necessary.)

I'll take a stab at it and no, I don't think a general GWR question belongs in the Legacy Forum.

Yes, I do know about Evergreen and Gleckler's listing it in 1956 so that may have been the first commercial offering of it so then the question becomes were there any GWR out there before that that weren't known by others.

I can only offer the following.

Many years ago I was growing four plants of Cherokee Green for seed production and one of them produced fruits that were white and the same size and shape of what I expected fir Cherokee Green. The taste was lousy and I never saved seeds, And at that time it didn't even occur to me to ask someone who knew more tomato genetics than I did how that could have happened.

The second event was when Amy Goldman found GWR fruits on a plant of the variety Dr. Carolyn, which is a whitish/pale yellow. I never asked her if it was one GWR on the plant, which would speak to a somatic mutation, or all fruits on that plant were GWRipes.

And the taste if both Dr. Carolyn is very good as was the taste of this GWR and she named it Green Doctors. I didn't understand what had happened so this time I asked someone who is an expert on tomato genetics and he came back with a very plausible detailed description of how that could have happened.

So I'm suggesting that it's perfectly possible that a so called white variety can change to a GWR just as a GWR such as Cherokee Green can change to a so called white.

And no doubt if I saw something like that many others must have seen the same and that before Evergreen was offered commercially in 1956.

[maf]

Thanks Carolyn.

The history of some of the varieties, (Aunt Ruby's German Green springs to mind), makes them sound old, but the histories always seem to be rather vague. It would be interesting if anyone knew of any documented references to GWR varieties pre 1956.

My own suspicion is that GWR types were first developed by plant breeders from deliberate crosses, but this remains a suspicion as I have no way of knowing for sure, and cannot rule out mutations and accidental crosses etc.

[nctomatoman]

Here is another thought (not unrelated to Carolyn's, really)....

I've scanned a lot - and I mean A LOT - of old seed catalogs. The vast majority of older, commercial tomatoes were red - a very, very few pink or yellow, even less orange or white. And that's it.

But now ponder the SSE Yearbook, any good recent seed catalog with lots of heirlooms - and we have all sorts of sizes, shapes and colors. My feeling is that due to the chance mutation, crossing, recessive genes and various combinations, the odd colors like the purples and browns and greens and stripes and streaks can emerge. The key question is whether a curious, observant gardener is there to save and distribute seeds....or are they tossed as something unexpected, hence unwanted?

So I have good confidence that the green when ripe varieties, just like the other oddities that we find common today but were never represented in old seed catalogs, arose in people's gardens along the way. And we have to be pretty happy that someone, somewhere saw fit to work with them enough so that they made it to today!

[maf]

Good point Craig. We are lucky to live in an age where the easy access to information means that interesting tomato variations can be recognized for what they are. Digital cameras, the internet and information technology allows hi-res pictures of them to be transmitted instantaneously around the globe, and people of like minds can trade seeds and breeding material easily no matter the geographic distance. An odd coloured tomato is a different proposition than it would have been 100 years ago.

The Green When Ripe types have the added problem of looking as if they are not ripe. I can imagine if, 150 years ago, one popped up in someone's mater patch in the back of beyond it could easily have been ignored as "the tomato plant that wouldn't ripen".

The flip side is, of course, that the average person these days has access to so much more diverse genetic material than at any time in the past, meaning that wierd recombinations of tomato DNA are much more likely in our times.