My breeding projects in 2015

[nicollas]

Can you please elaborate on the criteria you use to spot black from red fruits on flowers ? Thx

Do you know how many plants related to your breeding projects you grew this year ?

[bower]

Originally Posted by nicollas

Can you please elaborate on the criteria you use to spot black from red fruits on flowers ? Thx

Do you know how many plants related to your breeding projects you grew this year ?

Hi nicollas, the thread about flower and fruit colour is here:
http://www.tomatoville.com/showthrea...t=flower+color

For the number of plants, I selected for earliness from the seedling stage by keeping them in cups until buds or flowers had formed. So for the Beist F2 I kept only the two earliest of six, and Rozoviy Kuffah I kept two indeterminates and two dwarfs of 12, the others languished in one liter pots mostly, both indoors and out, and produced a few fruit but were basically ignored as late. Stubche the two earliest including the one with large buds were given some proper real estate, the later four siblings were planted all together in a large pot. Kim Kupola all three 'normal' and early plants shared a large tub (normally for two plants), and the possible Goblet mutant went in a three gallon pot. The two Mekiku F1 shared a maybe 10 gallon pot. Zosis I had six plants in total, the possible Goblet mutant was potted up and ended outdoors until later in the season when some plants had been removed from the greenhouse. BNZB I grew all four, and the three Black Nipper F3's. And three plants from the EPB crosses one each in the greenhouse and one outdoors.
Since I grew some OP's as well, the greenhouse was insanely crowded. Around 50 plants in space enough for 24 properly. It was too cold to put plants outside and expect them to do better, although some did go out and made it. I was glad to tear a few plants down when I had the excuse to do it (moldy stem, don't like the fruit etc). Overcrowding leads to ruthless behaviour.

[nicollas]

Thanks for the lengthy answer. You managed to do a lot of breeding work on a much smaller scale i've imagined !

[bower]

Originally Posted by nicollas

Thanks for the lengthy answer. You managed to do a lot of breeding work on a much smaller scale i've imagined !

Yes, but bear in mind that the results are also limited by the small scale.
It was good this year to cast a wide net, because the awful weather was a test that pointed out defects in certain lines, that means in a bad year they may not produce good tasting fruit or a marketable crop.

Small space means that it may take a lot longer to find the 'best' in a line.
But I think it's okay to select your best and grow it forward, along side a second group of F2's. If all the desired traits are not in one plant, a cross between generations down the line may be able to fix that.
Some traits really require a larger growout, for example larger fruit. Frogsleap published an excellent blog this past year, showing that their growout results were strongly skewed towards smaller and earlier fruit. Recovering a larger size fruit from Kim Kupola, for example, would take a minimum of ten plants for just one larger fruit. And it might not be a tasty one. It would be nice to find some large tasty fruit from this cross, but I can also be contented with small or medium sized.
One thing I am noticing about segregation for taste, so far. Either the good taste is a dominant cluster of traits, and most fruit of the cross are good tasting, or it just isn't there at all. For example in the Black Nipper F3, two of three were quite good and personally I couldn't tell them apart. Only one was obviously smaller and not as sweet, and 1/6 no good is also what I found in the Stupice X cherries. In Kim Kupola one of four was not so good tasting, although it did produce lots of fruit.

Greenhouse space is expensive to build and maintain, so naturally the farmers who depend on a crop for their livelihood can't take large risks that may waste their space and produce no crop for market. I may find someone willing to grow a larger group of Kim Kupola F2, if the less tasty fruit are in a ratio of one of four they could be sold as mixed pints and the customers would not be dissatisfied I think. I'm thinking that half a dozen F2 plants is enough to evaluate the taste and quality ratios, and identify the lines that can be grown in larger numbers without risking a financial loss. If more experienced breeders disagree, I hope they will tell me so!

I am also very curious to find out how the taste segregation goes when it comes to larger fruit. Both the Skipper and Rodney, and also the Warbler Yellow are expected to segregate for size in the F2 generation. Whether the sweetness and intensity is carried over into larger fruit, and whether the interesting texture in Skipper and Rodney - meaty and chewy - will be 'just right' in a larger fruit, remains to be seen. I would be happy to stabilize any of these three exactly as they are, but I think a medium sized fruit has a better production value. I would like to grow ten of each this year, if I can fit them in.

As regards segregation for taste, if the parents are right, possibly a larger growout makes it possible to find something truly unique and outstanding in the world of tomatoes. Those goals are great, but they are a bit beyond our more humble needs.

[jmsieglaff]

Really great work, very very interesting. Thanks for posting and keep on posting! The flower color piece is something I've missed previously. I'll keep a close eye on that this year. I'm planning on crossing a black and a yellow in 2016, growing the F1 in 2017 and the flower color might be a great way to select for black in the F2 in a much earlier point in the plant's life!

[Fred Hempel]

Really great work

[bower]

Originally Posted by jmsieglaff

Really great work, very very interesting. Thanks for posting and keep on posting! The flower color piece is something I've missed previously. I'll keep a close eye on that this year. I'm planning on crossing a black and a yellow in 2016, growing the F1 in 2017 and the flower color might be a great way to select for black in the F2 in a much earlier point in the plant's life!

You'll see in that thread, some work was published showing difference between yellow and red fruited flowers as well. I wasn't able to pick them out, maybe because I had no "known" yellow to compare with on site, but in hindsight I could see the difference is there, although it's more subtle than the black.
Yes, for those of us with small space, it's awesome to have an early "tell" for fruit colour.

Now if only I could find an early tell for determinate/semi-determinate growth habit. I tried... I failed. Telling them from indeterminates before plant out is evidently impossible.

[nicollas]

Yes sometimes it needs a lot of growouts, except if the project led itself to some backcrossing, for which case observation of flower phenotypes to genetic is really appreciated

[bower]

Originally Posted by Fred Hempel

Really great work

Thanks for the encouragement, Fred!
I'm always learning so much here on the forum, it was a relief to finally get a snow day and the time to share what came out of my little grow outs.

[MissS]

Thanks for posting all of this. It is very well documented and I enjoy following your trials.

[Nattybo!]

Originally Posted by bower

Here are a couple of pictures of Beta/Beta orange, -/- (red), and Beta/- fruit (orange-red). There were two reds out of six; one Beta/Beta; one gf/gf Beta/-, and two more Beta/- including the possible Goblet mutant which spent most of the summer outdoors in the cold but did produce some nice fruit at the end of it.

I just licked my screen

[Darren Abbey]

I really like the viny/grippy leaf trait. Your diagrams of leaf/flower pattern is making me thing of collecting similar data from a bunch of F2s I've been exploring;

[bower]

Originally Posted by Darren Abbey

I really like the viny/grippy leaf trait. Your diagrams of leaf/flower pattern is making me thing of collecting similar data from a bunch of F2s I've been exploring;

Darren it would be awesome to see more data of this kind.
We might actually figure out what is going on.
I would like to grow out the two parents of that Black Nipper cross this year and properly count the patterns that were there to start with, as well as some number of the F4 to see if I can stabilize the selected semi-determinate pattern.
If you have (or come up with) any ideas about the type of inheritance, it would help to predict how many plants need to be grown to stabilize a certain pattern (if indeed any desired pattern can be stabilized).
Joseph mentioned in another thread the number of small determinates in his grow out were iirc on the order of one in 16 I think. That's quite a few plants in F2 to find one that isn't semi-determinate in one way or another.
Also can't help wondering, if I'd grown more of these F3's how many different patterns would I find besides the rare "true determinate"? The mind sort of boggles.

I collected data from a number of OP's I grew this year as well, but doubt I will have time to put that in diagram or visual form any time soon. Overall, I found a variety of patterns where the common denominator seemed to be units of the sp/sp terminal bud pattern with a varying number of internodes/leaves repeated in between them, whether 2, 3, 5 or 7 leaves. Three 'paste' type plants: Heidi, Ukraine Purple, and Deep Space, all had a cluster-leaf-cluster pattern separated by intervals of seven leaves. A "Mr. Bruno" (or not) semi-determinate had 5 leaves between "terminal bud" sequences and repeated. etc. Number of repeats as well as number of internodes in the interval was variable from one OP to the next.

And there are even further details of growth habit, like the position of leaves in the sequence on the same or alternate side of the stem, which I noticed but could no way attempt to catalogue! Probably less important, nonetheless, Yowl. Tangly details.

[Darren Abbey]

My F2s are from an accidental F1 between "Tiny Tim" and a big-box-store type (likely a "Roma") I had the year prior. When the "mini" seedling started outpacing all the others, I set it aside to nurture in isolation so I could collect all of its (several hundred? thousand?) seeds. I've paid attention to fruit quality variation, dwarf/micro/normal ratios, and unexpected anthocyanin distributions. I've grown "Tiny Tim" every year as a control, but the other parent is only inferred.

After this year, with actually noting branching patterns, I might be able to have an idea of the ratios of branching forms in my F2s. Right now, my memory says they were all over the place, though I was mostly looking at stature and not branching/flower-leaf-order.

Regarding how to record all the details of the branching growth... Have you read about L-systems? They're a mathematically formalized method of generating branching systems. Some of the syntax used to write them may be helpful in transcribing the details of branching patterns seen in tomatoes.

[nicollas]

I agree that the grippy trait can be very usefull, please continue the good work on this line too

earlier you said "The precocious flowering trait from Kimberley is recessive", are you confident on this info ? Do you think it has the ft gene ?