2015 Breeding Lines

[bower]

Really beautiful tomatoes. I'm glad to see you posting again, I was wondering how the project was going. Very well, I see!

[Boutique Tomatoes]

This isn't a pretty tomato picture, but does show how I made my gardening lots easier this year.

I found cheap 12 foot wide pieces of 20 year landscape cloth to put down in the plots at home where I planted varieties I was evaluating and using for crosses this year. Weeding was virtually a non issue, which is usually a pain due to my travel schedule with work.



The remaining maintenance issue was that I wasn't around as often as needed to tie plants up. This is where the short determinate lines are nice, the ones in the back of the rows in this picture are already ripening fruits. Those are 6 foot stakes for reference.



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[ilex]

Originally Posted by Boutique Tomatoes

I'm currently focused on extended shelf life lines in my early generations, that was half of the crosses I made this year. Next year I'll be doing a large F2 grow out looking for a number of larger rin/rin lines to use for making salad size ESL hybrids and most of my 2016 crosses will be for adding in disease resistance factors and playing with making some F1 hybrid lines.

Have you considered using alc instead of rin?

As you want extended shelf life, there are many alc tomatoes developed with that in mind. 9 months storage is common. Is that enough? There are also many great tasting tomatoes among them.

I would love to see similar breeding work done with alc tomatoes.

[Boutique Tomatoes]

I have started considering alc, but haven't really gotten started looking for good sources of the gene to incorporate into my lines. I'd be interested to hear about any good tasting lines that do have the alc gene.

I figure for the next few years I'll be growing out 100's of plants a year selecting for Aft/gs/rin in true breeding lines which will stretch the limits of what I can do with tomatoes that never ripen.

I experimented this year with green tomato salsa that's a bit like a tomatillo based one and some green tomato pickles. If I get some lines that are exceptionally pretty and have some sweetness to them I'll see if any of the local chefs can come up with a novel use.

[ilex]

I'm building a seed bank of alc tomatoes, so I can help.

They can have amazing flavour. I've seen them win taste contests. They also have a distinct pleasant aroma, impressive in some cases.

Obviously, these tomatoes do rippen. Many make fantastic cooking tomatoes in very easy ways.

[Misfit]

Wow, first class!

-Jimmy