Joseph's Tomato Experiments

[Jimbotomateo]

11 seeds is good start. Prolly have to eat a handful for clarity. Can you squeeze another crop out before spring plant out?

[joseph]

I figure that it will take about 15 weeks to get F2 seed from today. And I like to plant 6 week old plants into the field on about June 5th. So I need about 23 weeks to plant them in the field on my normal schedule. My normal planting date is 25 weeks from now. So it's looking promising.

I have 4 more fruits that are close to ripening from this cross, and a couple of baby fruits. Perhaps they will flower again. They have perked up since I brought them in from the greenhouse.

I have similar crosses with fruits on them that look like they might be 3 to 4 weeks from ripening. So they will probably work out fine as well.

One of the F1 hybrids that I am working with is acting like it's male sterile or self-incompatible. They've had many inflorescences that haven't set fruit. I'm buzz pollinating them. I'm intending to attempt manual pollinations if the other varieties start flowering again.

[Jimbotomateo]

Sounds like the timings good. Hope you get something great out of one or more this year. Jimbo.

[joseph]

Originally Posted by joseph

One of the F1 hybrids that I am working with is acting like it's male sterile or self-incompatible. They've had many inflorescences that haven't set fruit. I'm buzz pollinating them.

I took out a magnifying glass today and examined the flowers. They have exerted stigmas!!!! Exactly what I'm looking for in the promiscuous pollination project.

F1: [Fern X LA1777]


Fern is my earliest slicing tomato. Red fruits about 4 to 6 ounces. Determinate. Leaves are fern-like.

LA1777 is Solanum habrochaites, a wild tomato from very high altitude in the Andes.

Wish that I would have paid attention to the flowers ten weeks ago when I had plenty of pollen being produced in the greenhouse. There are a few fruits maturing fruit for this cross, but there could have been so many more, and I could have mixed up the genetics more than I did. Oh well. Maybe I'll be a better plant breeder next growing season.

[Jimbotomateo]

Originally Posted by joseph

I took out a magnifying glass today and examined the flowers. They have exerted stigmas!!!! Exactly what I'm looking for in the promiscuous pollination project.

F1: [Fern X LA1777]


Fern is my earliest slicing tomato. Red fruits about 4 to 6 ounces. Determinate. Leaves are fern-like.

LA1777 is Solanum habrochaites, a wild tomato from very high altitude in the Andes.

Wish that I would have paid attention to the flowers ten weeks ago when I had plenty of pollen being produced in the greenhouse. There are a few fruits maturing fruit for this cross, but there could have been so many more, and I could have mixed up the genetics more than I did. Oh well. Maybe I'll be a better plant breeder next growing season.Wish that I would have paid attention to the flowers ten weeks ago when I had plenty of pollen being produced in the greenhouse. There are a few fruits maturing fruit for this cross, but there could have been so many more, and I could have mixed up the genetics more than I did. Oh well. Maybe I'll be a better plant breeder next growing season.

I'm sure you'll get something great. All the stories about scientists working on one thing and then gettin lucky and " accidentally " discovering something much better than they ever expected!. Jimbo.

[joseph]

Originally Posted by joseph

I squeezed the juice out and started it fermenting. There were about 11 seeds between the two fruits.

After fermenting, 5 seeds looked viable. I planted them. Three more fruits ripened day before yesterday, so I started them fermenting as well. More fruits are growing or ripening, so it looks like there will be plenty of seeds.

Last night, I daydreamed and planned about how to grow about 30 the different lines in mostly-isolated beds. I'm getting a lot of pollinators into the tomato patch, and the plants are shedding a lot of pollen, so even the inbred lines are becoming less stable. Next year, I'm treating tomatoes more like squash.

This evening, I posted a photo gallery onto my social media page containing some of the photos I've included in this thread. It reminded me all over again how much I love promiscuously pollinating tomatoes, and the bees that visit them.

[joseph]

This morning when I checked, the F2 seeds had germinated from a cross between a NOID domestic tomato and Solanum habrochaites. Looks like there will be plenty of time to get F3 seeds before my regular planting schedule in the spring.

Also have F2 seeds germinated from WXO X Sun4X. They are from a 3 way cross, so offspring should be interesting.

[Jimbotomateo]

Originally Posted by joseph

This morning when I checked, the F2 seeds had germinated from a cross between a NOID domestic tomato and Solanum habrochaites. Looks like there will be plenty of time to get F3 seeds before my regular planting schedule in the spring.

Also have F2 seeds germinated from WXO X Sun4X. They are from a 3 way cross, so offspring should be interesting.

Happy it's going so well Joseph. I'll be following keep us posted on successes and even the miscues are interesting.. Jimbo

[Harborseal]

Thanks for letting us follow along with this. I haven't read the whole thread but if you don't mind me asking, how much land do you use for tomatoes and how far apart are your different types? Is it safe to assume the flavor has improved without your actively selecting for that? Thanks.

[joseph]

I farm about 4 acres, split between 7 widely separated fields, so I have plenty of isolation options. I favor promiscuous pollination, so I don't fuss much about isolation.

I have tasted fruits from every plant before saving seeds from them for 2 to 4 generations now. And some of the crosses that I made to start were with varieties that I had enjoyed eating in the past. The first year that I tasted every tomato, I was horrified that some of them tasted like grocery store tomatoes. They were trivial to eliminate.

[Keen101]

Nice work Joseph! I look forward to seeing what this project turns into in only a few more seasons!

p.s. the fern leaf cross sounds interesting. Do you have any that have potato leaves that will make it into the project?

[joseph]

I currently have five F1 plants growing which are descended from a cross between a potato leaved domestic tomato and S. habrochaites. They didn't make seeds for me this winter, like some of the other wild crosses did. So my hope for them is to keep them alive until it warms up enough to return them to the greenhouse, or to plant them into real soil.

I call the potato-leaved domestic variety Brad. It is typically tied for first place as the earliest fruiting tomato in my garden. The red fruits are about 2 to 4 ounces. It is indeterminate.

Phenotype of the hybrid leaves is different than with the crosses to fern-leaved or regular-leaved. The cross with the potato-leaved parent have about half as many stipules per leaf as the other crosses.

There are 4 F1 plants growing from the fern-leaved mother. She is determinate, my earliest tomato in the 6 to 10 ounce size. Red fruited. I am placing a lot of hope in her descendants. I have about 5 F2 seeds from this cross. I'm intending to wait till closer to spring to plant them. I wasn't paying attention to the flowers, or I would have noticed that they are panamorous, so I could have attempted a different pollination strategy.

There are 6 or 7 F1 plants growing from a mother which was probably determinate. Red fruited. I have 15 F2 seeds from this cross, and 3 to 4 plants that are about two weeks old.

There are 4 F1 plants from a mother named "Black Prince". They didn't produce any seeds yet, so again my strategy is to try to keep them alive until spring.

Also, I have some seeds and plants which may contain back crosses in which these F1 crosses could be the pollen donor. The mother of these potential crosses is herself the result of a complex series of crosses that include wild species on both sides of the family tree. She is panamorous, so even if the crosses didn't take, or even if I can't tell from the phenotype, they still promise to be very useful to the promiscuous pollination project. I'm also hoping to keep this family alive for the winter. Although, it looks like I have already lost half of them. No worries. They made seeds.

Here's what they currently look like:


That set of plants with the ripe fruits on them are a cross I made only because pollen and flowers were available. They are F1 offspring of a cross between [Yellow Pear X Brad]. I expect that the offspring don''t contain any of the traits I am looking for in any of my breeding projects. But, an earlier yellow pear might be interesting, or a potato-leaved pear might be interesting. A red pear might be interesting. In any case, I expect the cross to produce a wide diversity of large cherry tomatoes.

[Jimbotomateo]

Fascinating Joseph. Brad should be real interesting. Hope the five survive. What's the largest tomato you've found useful in your promiscuis project?

[joseph]

The largest-fruited tomato to emerge so far from my promiscuous pollination project is called Big Hill. Fruits are about 12 ounces, so they are the biggest fruits that I can typically grow in my garden. The plant is determinate. Fruits are bicolored red/yellow. Taste is to my liking. It's among the earliest ripening tomatoes in my garden.

Big Hill Tomato


Big Hill, exerted stigma.

[Cole_Robbie]

It looks very good.