Hilbert's Grand tomato Hotel - 2016

[jmsieglaff]

This flower color stuff really intrigues me. Here is an F2 I have. I look at this and then think purple/black/green. What do you think?

[bower]

Originally Posted by jmsieglaff

This flower color stuff really intrigues me. Here is an F2 I have. I look at this and then think purple/black/green. What do you think?

That's a beaut ! The greenish flower says black fruit to me.

[Tormato]

I just have one question.
How does Michael Jackson's glove get into so many of your pictures?

Dr. Lve Apple

[bower]

Originally Posted by Tormato

I just have one question.
How does Michael Jackson's glove get into so many of your pictures?

Dr. Lve Apple

That's Prince's glove not Michael's. Couldn't find a white one. I am duly abashed. Will do better next time.

[bower]

Yesterday and today I moved quite a few of the guests outdoors into er.. temporary accomodations. The weather has gotten rather warm so this at least is not a worry.
Since we still have bee in house, cross pollination outdoors is not a big worry either. If I want true seeds in or out, I'll have to bag them. Meanwhile I've given up on flower colour, being suspicious of more than a few, I simply moved them outside and kept only those with some trait I definitely am interested in.
I cornered the bee one evening, but didn't have the heart to kill it.
So I took pictures of it instead. Jaunty little thing... and what a tomato enthusiast!

[bower]

Also having some unhappy adventures with the new bedding. Long story short, I was told the mix would contain a portion of sand, but when delivered I learned that it contained "topsoil" instead of sand, which in this country means "clay". The weather was cold, the clay was wet, and evidently some unfriendly opportunistic bacteria may have affected the stems of my plants as well. I suspect "blackleg" as known from potato - because there was blackleg in several bags of potatoes I brought home from the store and also on carrots (which looked perfect for three days at least).
So my transplants developed symptoms of "tomato pith necrosis" - as far as I can tell - I haven't cut any but they had yellowing new growth and then developed swellings on the stems. I did a soil intervention to break up the compacted mess and introduce some friendlier microbes, and the weather warmed up and they seem to have "outgrown" the condition, for now.
For your interest, pics of stem swellings. Some plants dropped fruit or flowers, some are setting normally in spite of the vascular stress.

[bower]

One of the F2 features I was looking to recapture in this line is the large cluster size. The two earliest - PL and RL - have that trait. The RL is just opening a cluster which - I counted 38 buds!! I'm not sure what I would have to do to get it to set ALL of those, but I would sure love to see it.

[bower]

Kitten Paws PL has clusters averaging 16 - this one has 22 flowers. She is still setting up the first cluster, no drops or misses so far, although you can see some stem swellings are present.

[bower]

Another trait I was hoping to stabilize is the shape of the fruit - the flat mini beef like the shape of a paw. The PL is the only one with a much more rounded shape fruit. KPRL1 has a mix of shapes, KP3-Blk and KP5 both have large clusters and the flat beef shape as shown here. Both KP4 and KP6 have smaller clusters - KP 6 shown below had only four flowers in a cluster, but the fruit are a gorgeous flat beef shape and I wonder if they will be larger as well.

[bower]

All of the Skipper plants, which had small flowers as well, appear to have much the same shape as last year - a mini beef shape in clusters of 6, exactly as before. The cluster shown below has four fruit well on the way, and the shape is typical of all of them. It seems this combination of traits is easy to stabilize.
Sadly the same isn't true of Rodney, which had a lovely radish shaped fruit in the F1, also in clusters of six. The two earliest F2's are very different this time. T1 has spectacular large flower clusters but has been slow to set. The baby fruit certainly don't look at all pointy. And the fruit on S1 are distinctly more of a beef, and probably a larger fruit out of the Black Early part of the parentage. Nasty catface on the first one.
The later flowering Rodneys have gone to live outdoors, the third one also looks flat fruited and the fourth a suspected cross. So it looks like the pointy trait is harder to recover, and I will have to grow more F2's next time to find one.

[jmsieglaff]

Sorry about the vascular issues, the symptoms sure are weird looking. The mini beefsteak shapes are neat, really don't see much of those, good luck stabilizing it!

[bower]

Thanks, some luck would surely help.
I don't have high expectations for this season, but I'll get what I can out of it. The plants are looking fine at the moment but that could change like the weather (with the weather!), and bring it all to a screeching halt. For sure the vascular issues could turn fatal at some point, and don't know if fruit or seeds will be good or worthless.

I'll be at the 90 day mark on Saturday, and get some data then on the determinate/semideterminate growth habits in the Black Nipper F4.

As regards segregation for growth habit (sp) and Beta in the two lines out of Zolotoe Serdtse X Indian Stripe, I am stumped that there doesn't seem to be a single sp/sp Beta/Beta in either of them, at six plants each. I keep going back and counting leaves hoping I missed something.
One happy surprise is to find a determinate among the Skipper F2's. I just hope the fruit will be larger than a cherry and as sweet as the F1. So far the plant is much smaller than the Black Nippers of the same age, but is ahead of them with early fruit.

[jmsieglaff]

And FWIW, your flower color method nailed my F2 cherry--it turned out to be chocolate.

[bower]

Good to hear that! I also had no trouble picking black fruited from a pool of red or pink on the basis of flower color, again.
But I failed completely, at finding unexpected 'reds' in a black pool. I was so worried about unexpected bee crosses that I misjudged the color changes when the flower is overmature, and thought they were indicating a red or pink therefore crossed. It didn't happen!
And although my shape and size results weren't what I "expected" I think that was naivety on my part, about the amount of variation I should expect in these generations. On the basis of fruit color I have no reason to believe that this was due to unintended crosses.

I also overestimated the vascular issues when I believed there was "pith necrosis" bacteria involved. At the end of season when I cut the plants down, all of their stems were green and solid with no sign of necrosis. So it was purely physiological - a sign of just how bad and wrong that mix was for containers.
I'm hoping to get a chill day between xmas and new years to go through my photos and data and post some results. I did have a cpu crash again this year and the cpu I used as backup later crashed too, so I may need some fun with a screwdriver and a toaster to retrieve all the photos from July and August. Another reminder.... it is better to share than to hoard your data and pix!!! Just do it, when ever you can.

[bower]

Ok I've now gone over all the pix and data and got them ready to post... still mulling over what it means, and where to take it next time...

One of the most important lessons for me this year at the Hilbert, is to never underestimate the effects of environment on gene expression. More about that with particular lines...
The weather is always different, but this year we also had other changes.
First, I didn't use the cold treatment for seedlings as I usually do.
Second, I started later than normal so day length was different.
Third, the soil environment was completely different and not for the better.
Fourth, overcrowding in the greenhouse was worse than ever, so I got to evaluate some plants in "deep shade".
Fifth, weather was special, and especially for plants in the hotel "annex", since we had at least two frosts or frost warnings every month of the growing season.

So taking everything with a confounding grain of salt, only time and generations will tell if my tentative conclusions or genetics "lessons" are useful. Everything comes with a question mark...

Except for one thing, which is, I stand corrected... the proper truism is "Build it and they will come" not "let them come, and then you'll build it". And although extra guests can always be accomodated at Hilbert's Hotel, there's no guarantee they will find the accomodations perfectly adequate.