Tomato pollination question

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by feldon30

You do NOT have bee activity early.
You save seeds from LATER fruit.

I guess I am misreading.

*****

Not quite.

Of course we have bee activity early, but not as much as later in the season as I've found out by saving seeds from early vs late fruits and trying to see which ones have the lowest X pollination rate.

But as I said above, bee activity is different in different areas, so folks just have to find out for themselves what the situation is.

In addition, while most of our garden tomatoes have retracted stigmas, environmental conditions can occasionally cause those stigmas to be exherted on a few varieties, in which case there's a greater possibility of X pollination.

Lots of variables.

Yes, I think you certainly did misread what I said.

[dice]

Mathfed:

The way commercial breeders and hobbyists
get homogeneous F1 seed is by trimming the
pollen-bearing stamens off of a blossom just
before it opens (with tiny scissors or a very
sharp exacto blade or a razor blade, etc),
preventing that blossom from self-pollenating.
Then they pollenate that blossom by hand with
pollen from a different cultivar, and perhaps bag
the blossom to prevent any insects from polluting
the intended cross with unknown genes while
the emasculated flower is still receptive to
pollenation.

(These pictures don't really have enough detail
to show someone exactly how to do it, just
enough to get the idea:

http://www.avrdc.org/LC/tomato/hybrid/08emasc.html
)

Hobbyists don't necessarily go to all of this trouble.
I can imagine someone using pollen from a Regular
Leaf (RL) parent to pollenate a flower on a Potato
Leaf parent without emasculating it first, using a
make-up brush or drinking straw or something like
that, and then assuming that any RL offspring
from seeds of that fruit are the F1 hybrid and any
PL offspring are from self-pollenation in that same
fruit (the PL characteristic is genetically recessive,
so hybrid offspring will be RL).

If they intend to grow more of that PL parent in
successive crops anyway, no big deal if most of
the seeds end up the result of self-pollenation,
as long as they get a few of the RL hybrid out of
it.

You can imagine how labor-intensive it must be
to produce pounds of F1 hybrid seed that customers
are going to complain about if it has random
crosses and self-pollenations in it.

[carolyn137]

You can imagine how labor-intensive it must be
to produce pounds of F1 hybrid seed that customers
are going to complain about if it has random
crosses and self-pollenations in it.

*****

And there's another method that's being used more and more which is much less labor intensive and that's using male steriles.

So that means that the stigma recipient can't be pollenized by self pollen and any applied pure pollen does the trick in getting lots of F1 seed at a much lower labor cost.