In lieu of bees, a tiny pollinator

[ArthurDent004]

I think we'll get to the point that we could custom build a plant from the ground up with all the characteristics desired. You won't have to do any cross-breeding or splicing you'll select the characteristics from a gene bank, have a computer model the results, and then build the plant from the gene sequence.

It will probably look something like the project below.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/...ricit?ref=live

I hope I can get some of these seeds next year and give this plant a try.

My little pollinator is my battery-powered toothbrush.

[cythaenopsis]

^ Whoa... I didn't know about that glowing plant project.

Nature does have some remarkable characteristics in many plants and animals, but from what I've seen, the glowing ability of sea life is rather limited. Perhaps they've found a way to enhance such ambient light abilities. Still, I can't see someone having a glowing potted plant in a room in place of a table lamp. A night light at best. But who knows... maybe at some point they'll come up with an organic LED! Imagine a plant with LED nodes attached to each leaf. When photosynthesis ceases due to insufficient light, the LED's come on.

[Lorri D]

Hello Joseph, I think you have said before that you take your produce to market. I was wondering how your landrace tomatoes taste and if you can depend on them to be marketable every year? And/or maybe a better question is there always a percentage that you get that you would not be able to sell due to taste or looks etc, because of an undesirable cross? Just seems risky to never know what you are going to get, but maybe that risk is much lower than I was thinking. Thank you, Lorri D

[joseph]

Lorri:

Some of my clientele are always asking for new tastes and different colors, so for them I can't grow enough odd-ball tomatoes. These are the same kind of people that will try every heirloom tomato at market, not with the expectation that it will be a great tomato, but for the novelty of it. These are perhaps 30% of the buyers at my market.

Due to the topography of the mountains, my garden is colder than average for this area. That means that my ability to grow any tomato at all is quite limited. I end up growing small tomatoes that weigh around 2 to 6 ounces, and they show up late in the season. I pick more green tomatoes to avoid frost than I do ripe tomatoes.

People at slightly lower elevation can bring great tomatoes to market 2 weeks before I do. Add a few weeks of season extension and a few degrees of warmth due to a high tunnel, and it's pretty hopeless for me to compete successfully in the fresh slicing tomato market.

I primarily market my tomatoes as canning/juicing tomatoes. For that purpose one tomato is as good as any other.

A tomato cross is not something that a small scale farmer or gardener should fear. Plants are like people: They tend to resemble their parents. And the traits of the offspring tend to be mid-way between the traits of their parents. So if two great tomatoes cross with each other, the descendants are likely to be great tomatoes. If a great tomato and a mediocre tomato cross then the result is likely to be a better than mediocre tomato.

I don't have unpalatable tomatoes showing up very often. Those traits were mostly eliminated from the gene-pool centuries before I was born. About 30% of my tomato crop is lost to things like touching the soil, or insects, or birds, or mammals, etc... If a bad tasting tomato ever showed up I'd treat it the same way I do these other sorts of defects: Trade it to the chicken farmer for eggs or meat.

I grow about 400 tomato plants per year. I only save seeds from about 70 plants per year. I save seeds only from plants that have traits that I want to enhance in my garden. This is not a complete list, but it goes something like this:

Any plant that shows signs of disease or blossom-end-rot gets chopped out immediately.

Any plant that is repeatedly attractive to Colorado Potato Beetles gets chopped out quickly.

No catfaced, fluted, or roma shaped tomatoes are saved for seed.

Don't save seeds from any plant that failed to produce ripe fruit before frost.

Then I save four kinds of seed from the garden.

1- A blend of cherry tomatoes.

2- Any saladette or larger fruit produced during the first week or two of the harvest season.

3- Representatives from those plants that are producing really well just before my fall frosts. These may include saladette tomatoes that are still producing as well as larger (around 8 ounce fruits) that are my main canning tomatoes.

4- All growing season long, examine the flowers to find open anther cones, exposed stigmas, and plants that are attractive to bumblebees. Mark those plants with a flag to save for seed pretty much regardless of how bad other traits are. Make intentional crosses between these types of plants.

Then the next year I plant:

1- A few cherry tomatoes.

2- Some saladette tomatoes.

3- A lot of canning tomatoes.

4- Some experimental promiscuously pollinating plants.

Because children tend to resemble their parents, and because tomatoes are mostly self pollinating I get the same types of tomatoes showing up every year. I get cherry tomatoes. I get early saladette tomatoes that may not be very productive, and I get end of season canning tomatoes. I don't get blossom end rot, or diseased plants, or catfaced fruits, or fluted fruits, etc. Most of my plants end up being determinate, or semi-determinate. Indeterminate plants spend too much time growing foliage to do well in my climate. I would make other choices of what to save seed from if I lived in a warmer climate.

Eventually I will move my entire tomato population into the promiscuously pollinating population. With potatoes I made that move in a single afternoon. I'm halfway tempted to do the same with tomatoes. I cried for a long time about throwing away 95% of my potato genome.