german johnson

[dice]

Originally Posted by tyrupp

Out of the german johnson seedlings that i have ,the regular leaf one is the biggest. Do you think it would be wrong to name Big Johnson?

When I see one RL seedling in a bunch of PL seedlings, all from
the same seed packet, that says "bee-made cross" to me (likely
an F1 plant). It can be a stray seed of something entirely
different that is both stable and RL, it can be a mutation,
etc, but the bee-made cross is far more common in what
I have seen from seeds of PL cultivars.

If you grow it out and save seeds, it should get a different
name, so as not to confuse it with the original PL cultivar,
and I bet you see a mix of RL and PL seedlings from seeds
saved from that RL plant (F2 seeds).

[amideutch]

I'd like to see those that like heirloom tomatoes and other plants and live in the South Central Pa./Maryland areas support her this season. She has the best assortment of Heirlooms in the area.

Camo, I agree whole heartedly. Thats why I posted the link to her site. If anybody grows Dana's Benton German Johnson this year please set aside a few seeds for the old Ami.

Camo, you don't need to keep justifying your naming of Cowlicks to anyone. It was not done on a whim but after several grow outs and comparisons. This is how we identify something new by giving it a name to differentiate it from the rest of the group. And if I didn't think it was worthy of special recognition I would never had started the Cowlick's give away at Tville. And I never did list it in the SSE yearbook per your request as you wanted all folks to have the opportunity to grow Cowlick's.

And your annual listing of your tomato grow outs is always looked forward to by tomato growers all over the world including myself. Not to mention your generosity in sharing seed of the new varieties you find which is becoming more the norm of that special group of people who grow heirloom tomatoes. Ami

[b54red]

Originally Posted by camochef

Bill,
Thanks for the kind comments. I hope T6 and DDR both do very well down your way. While T6 was my best tasting red last year and did quite well the year before, it hasn't had the reported success from down south as Cowlick's has.
DDR has had a little better response but not that many from the deep south, so I'm hopeful that they will do well.
DDR was right behind Bear Creek last season for best tasting black and the year before it was my best tasting tomato over all.
I hope you solved your TSWV problem and that you have a great gardening season ahead of you! Enjoy!
Camo

Camo I think most varieties have a harder time down here because of the heat and humidity. As to TSWV, I don't think there is a real solution other than planting those tasteless hard hybrids that have some resistance. I saved seed from the Cowlicks and Wes that survived the disease to see if there is a genetic resistance from those two plants. I will only know for sure if one of them gets TSWV this year which I really hope is less of a problem than last year. I did find frequent spraying for a week or so after seeing the first thrips feeding on the new growth and blossoms to be very helpful. The thrips seem to come in waves several weeks apart which may be more of a wind direction thing than anything else.
I'll let you know how DDR and T6 perform down here.

[camochef]

Bill,
I'm well aware of your heat and humidity differences, although its hard to believe in July and August up here some years. That's why I was amazed that Cowlicks performed as well as it did in the Phillipines.
I thought thrips were a problem usually brought in by the addition of greenhouse grown plants. I had a friend that had a real problem with them which he finally solved by using a mild bleach solution bath on all his new plants. ( his problem initially came from onion plants from one of my favorite suppliers).
Then again, I just grow a few tomatoes and am far from being any kind of expert.
Wishing you much good luck and hopefully you'll have good news to report on T6 and DDR. We now return this thread to the German Johnsons.
Camo

[mensplace]

Back in the late sixties when working at Green Brothers Nursery we carried the potato leaf variety of German Johnson which produced the very low, pink, low acid fruit. Back then I was told, for what it's worth, that it was an old NC variety from the Moravians around Winston Salem. I do know that it is very popular in western NC and has been for a long time. It used to also be widely grown in the Edneyville/Lake Lure area throughout Apple Valley on the way to Hensersonville. Mecklenburg County was named after Charlotte of Mecklenburg, but that was purely to honor her marriage to George III. I'm not aware of any early German presence in any large numbers except around the Salem area, but imagine that some did come along with the Scots out of NY, and PA down the Appalachians. Like all, I could find nothing verifiable about the origin of German Johnson.

[nctomatoman]

In 2006 a tomato seedling customer brought me some seeds for German Johnson that he swore was the best tomato he'd eaten - it ended up to be a large potato leaf pink - he was an elderly man and I can't find his name anywhere, but says it was one that was handed down for "years". Just another part of the mystery.

I've grown it - large pink fruit, potato leaf plant, more mealy/less seedy than the regular leaf ones I've grown - and like all of them, not a flavor favorite to our palates.

[carolyn137]

http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/l...150319429.html

The above from GW and Mulio is Keith Mueller who for several years was based in W NC where he was getting his MS with Dr. Randy Gardner.

Craig knows him well, as do I, and Keith's wife is from Raleigh where Craig lives.

I think it much more likely that the original GJ was RL,in the places Keith mentioned and then it went to a PL form, I've discussed how that happens several times here, and that happened in the other place that Keith mentioned.

Going from RL to PL is called a forward change, going from PL back to RL is the reverse and almost never happens, actually I've not heard of such a STABLE TRUE reversion, since the exact same sequence that allowed for the PL form to occur has a probablility of well, near zero, going backwards.

So both the PL and RL forms are legitimate, many have grown both and found no other changes other than leaf form. And we all know of PL variants of original RL's where the PL form is found to be identical to the RL form, at least by all who have grown both the same year to remove the variables.

One example which I think lots of folks know is KB, Kellogg's Breakfast, RL, going to KBX, the PL form/

Hope that helps.

Carolyn

[mensplace]

I don't know whether the PL versus the RL as described "large pink fruit, potato leaf plant, more mealy/less seedy than the regular leaf ones I've grown", but do remember that the sixties is Georgia was the first time I had ever seen a PL variety of any kind. Back then there were nowhere near the number of varieties in the south. Green Brothers was all over the Atlanta area long before the takeover by Pikes, and before the numbers of folks moved down from NY, who brought with them the taste for Beefsteak, though Rutgers, Marglobe, and Manalucie was very popular until the series that followed Big Boy. The PL German Johnson was something of a novelty as a relative newcomer here as nobody had seen the odd shaped leaf locally. It was after 72, when I frequented Western NC, that I saw them before the "Mountain" series was developed. Since then, the German Johnson has often been found at the state market in Asheville, but the Mountain series soon developed a loyal following until Brandywine and more "exotic" colors of heirlooms arrived on the scene.

[camochef]

German Johnson fans,
I hate to do this, but I'm about to add to the German Johnson confusion. I've been growing German Johnson-Benton strain for about 8 years now. It's a regular leafed plant that produces really meaty, tasty tomatoes.
A couple years back, Dana cave me a German Johnson-Benton strain grafted to maxifort rootstock. It was the most productive, best tasting tomato of the year. Of course I saved seed from it and from the original German Johnson-Benton strain.
The seed from the grafted plant, produced all potato leafed plants the following year. ????

Now comes the really confusing segment.
This year I started 7 German Johnson-Benton strain from 2013 and 2012. Of the 7, five were R. L. and two were P.L. (no record of which were from what year).
One of the P.L. plants was destroyed in severe wind storms. The surviving P.L. took significantly longer to ripen, although they were all planted out on the same day.
You can imagine my surprise when the fruit on the P.L. plant ripened and I found it to be a "black" tomato. That's right, A Black German Johnson-Benton Strain-P.L.
Not only shocked by the color but also by the taste. Best tasting tomato of the season. Competition has been stiff too. I grew:
Cowlick's Brandywine
German Johnson-Benton Strain
Tarasenko6
Earl's Faux
Purple Dog Creek
Amazon Chocolate
Barlow Jap
Terhune
Brandywine-Sudduths
Red Brandywine
Sandul Moldovan
Pink Sweet
Liz Birt
Bear Creek
Dana's Dusky Rose
Cherokee Purple
DDRxBW-C (a pink Dana's Dusky Rose/Brandywine Cowlick's cross)
Mountain Fresh

A collection of my favorites grown over the last 8 or 9 years. All large slicers. Going by fruit characteristics I would assume the black color came from a natural cross with Bear Creek, which is a Brandywine/Cherokee Purple cross.
(this is the first time in years that I brought Cherokee Purple back to my gardens).
Neither DDR (medium sized-black) nor Amazon Chocolate (a large oblate black fruit with dark green shoulders) look similar.

What should I call it? Black German Johnson - Benton Strain-Potato leafed cross. Maybe, Gettysburg High Water Mark or just another tomato from Pennsylvania.

Like many of this years tomatoes, the plant has been pulled andis on the burn pile as the season is over for many of them. It may be gone, but it won't be soon forgotten. A great tasting tomato and a bit of a mystery!
Enjoy!
Camo

[carolyn137]

A collection of my favorites grown over the last 8 or 9 years. All large slicers. Going by fruit characteristics I would assume the black color came from a natural cross with Bear Creek, which is a Brandywine/Cherokee Purple cross.
(this is the first time in years that I brought Cherokee Purple back to my gardens).
Neither DDR (medium sized-black) nor Amazon Chocolate (a large oblate black fruit with dark green shoulders) look similar.

What should I call it? Black German Johnson - Benton Strain-Potato leafed cross. Maybe, Gettysburg High Water Mark or just another tomato from Pennsylvania.

Like many of this years tomatoes, the plant has been pulled andis on the burn pile as the season is over for many of them. It may be gone, but it won't be soon forgotten. A great tasting tomato and a bit of a mystery!
Enjoy!

$$$$$$

Nope, you don't call it Black German Johnson since I agree with you that it's the result of natural cross pollination, so you don't know what it is, other than one parent was German Johnson.

You must have seeds from some fruits or you wouldn't have suggested calling it Black German Johnson,Right.

So what you need to do now is to resow those saved seeds, put out lots of plants,make some selections and see what you get, hopefully next year, but who knows,looking for what resembles your black one.

I don'thave any problem with the leaf change as I explained above, but getting a PL means that true German Johnson, RL, is heterozygous for leaf form or you couldn't get a PL.

Craig and I were wrong when we named OTV Brandywine( Off the Vine Brandywine) at least I think so, since only one parent was Brandywine.

And that's why I don't like to se a natural cross where one parent is known to be named with that one parent, since it no longer IS that one parent.

When I'm looking at varieties at Tania's website I see that more and more folks are doing so I see, fo rinstance:

Amana Orange
Amana Black
Amana Red
Amana Pink

Some of those are listed, but not all, I no longer have perfect memory. LOL And I don't think it's a good idea to do that,

Mike, if you don't have the room to grow it out perhaps you could get someone else to do so.

Or are you thinking of sharing F2 seeds, named just as F2 seed from the cross, to certain others and seeing if they can get out, by selection, what you saw with this one plant. Taste is more dicey, since what they might taste and you tasted could be worlds apart.

Carolyn

[camochef]

Carolyn,
I guess I was acting somewhat tongue in cheek when discussing naming the black German Johnson potato leaf. I really have no intention of distributing any of the seeds that I had saved from it. Which hasn't been that many.
To be truthful, I've saved very little seeds this season for multiple reasons that I won't get into.

Having enough room is not a problem at all, as I have a little more than 5 acres here. The physical ability to plant and maintain large gardens anymore is a different story.
This year has been one of the strangest years I've ever experienced here in Pa. It was a cold and late winter with a spring that just remained cold. Even when we got into summer, it remained much colder than normal. We saw temperatures in the low 40's overnight in July and August. This caused fruits to ripen much later than normal and when they finally began to ripen, it seemed like everything ripened at once.
We had numerous storms early in the growing season and I lost about 20 plants to the severe winds. This still left me just over 40 plants, but I couldn't keep up with their concentrated ripening. Even giving away huge amounts, left me up to my eyeballs in ripe tomatoes. Many went into the compost bins.
But now that I've been pulling plants, most of that is behind me. Still I intend to send some seeds to a couple gardening friends to see what they get from this Black German Johnson, if they are so inclined to try it. Unfortunately, none of us are getting any younger and we all want to reduce the size of our gardens.
Although I've been growing tomatoes for well over 50 years, I still don't understand certain terminology. Darlene has tried recently to teach me, but its hard to teach an old dog new tricks. F-1, F-2, through F-7,???, it's all Greek to me. Not well versed in tomato diseases either. Perhaps someday, if I live long enough.
Thanks for your comments and guidence.
Enjoy!
Camo