Dwarf

[frogwash]

Hello:

I've been hanging out here for a few months and learning a lot but haven't posted. So in order to earn my keep, here goes:

Is Dwarfism a spontaneous genetic mutation or ??? Before I found Tomatoville I had ordered several packets of seeds from Gurney's (i won't make that mistake again but that's another story). Anyhow, one of them was Delicious and it was listed as a heirloom. I started them from seed and planted them out on May 2 when they were in the 8" - 10" range. Two of them grew normally but one seemed at first a little stunted. The two normal ones are 6 foot-ish (all my plants are a bit smaller than last year, I'm not sure if it's my soil or the fact that this summer is lots cooler than last year), the runt is just barely topping three foot. The tomatoes that I've been getting from all three are similar and all in the 8 - 15 ounce range. But the little one is quite a bit bushier, especially for its size and I'm getting probably twice as many tomatoes from it. There are twenty on it right now

Do I have a Dwarf, a mixed up seed (the Delicious is the only red tomato this year) or was there an accidental cross at the seed factory?

Here are some pictures:







There are some flowers growing up into the cage, i was trying to show the stalk, it does 3 or 4 main stalks towards the bottom, the only pruning i did was just a couple lower branches to keep them off the ground at the very beginning, before I put down the straw.

Are these seeds something that anybody would want?

Thanks,
Theo

[carolyn137]

Delicious was bred by Burpee and isn't an heirloom variety.

http://tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/Delicious

Is it a dwarf? Nope.

Please go to the main Dwarf Project Forum, the first sticky by Craig, the first post by Craig and he defines what a Dwarf is as compared to other plant habits.

Was the dwarf type of tomato variety an initial mutation? Yes, and long ago and far away.

Here's an explanation from Victory Seeds, and Craig adds in his explanation that Dwarf varieties have rugose foliage. I added this here b'c after cutting and pasting from Victory Seeds I find I can't continue posting.:

One class of tomatoes exhibits characteristics of both determinate and indeterminate types. Historically they are called "tree-type".
" . . . the tomato De Laye, often called Tree tomato. This originated about 1862 in a garden at Chateau de Laye, France. In this the plant rarely exceeds 18 inches in height, is single-stemmed or with few very short branches, the nodes very short, the fruit clusters few and small. From this, by crossing with other types, there has been developed a distinct class of dwarf tomatoes which are of intermediate form and character and are well represented by Dwarf Champion.1

[frogwash]

OK. Thanks. I did look in the dwarf section but didn't know what a tree tomato is or was and somehow or another missed the 18" part.

I did look at pictures of what was there and it was too hard to tell. So this is just a runt or something?

p.s. I won't ever order from gurney's again, there customer service is worse than there descriptions and they have an attitude to match.

[Wi-sunflower]

It's something you may never really know.

It could just be a stray seed. If the fruit is nothing like the others.

It could be a crossed seed. If similar but still a bit dif as the other parent should have added something to the plant besides Dwarfism. But from the Dwarf project, that is not likely as the Dwarfism shouldn't show up til the F-3 generation.

i'm sure there are other options but those are what come to my mind.

Carol

[dice]

While 3 feet tall by this time of year fits a lot of tree-type dwarf
varieties (also called "indeterminate short internode", or ISI),
that is also the usual size of a normal determinate tomato plant.
So it could be a stray seed from a determinate type or a chance
cross between Delicious and some determinate cultivar with
similar fruit that the same farmer that grew the Delicious
for seeds was growing at the same time in a nearby field or row.

Sometimes when you cross an indeterminate like Delicious
with a determinate that only grows to 3' you get an indeterminate
plant (branches do not end in flower clusters) that also only
grows to 3'. If you had a greenhouse and could keep it growing
over the winter, by next spring it might be 5' or 6' tall. Aurora
and Sasha's Altai are both indeterminates that stay that small
for me in a typical summer.

Russian Red plants (an indeterminate tree-type dwarf with rugose
foliage) never get taller than 3' in my summers, but a grower
in New Zealand, where it was originally developed, kept one
alive for 3 years in his greenhouse, by which time it was growing
up the walls and out along tables and so on.

And your small plant could be a mutation to an otherwise
standard Delicious plant that now has a "dwarf gene". That
would be the least likely of all of the possibilities, because
mutations are far more rare than bee-made chance crosses
or human-made stray seeds in packets of something else.
But it is possible.

[frogwash]

Thank you all for the info.

[dice]

This page has a list of tomato genes:
http://tgrc.ucdavis.edu/Genes.html

If you look at d-4 and d-5 in the left column, those are
dwarf genes that, according to the comments, would not
produce the thick stems and rugose leaves of the classic
"tree-type dwarf" plant type. That is the sort of thing that
could turn up via mutation in one generation or in an F2
plant from a cross between a normal indeterminate and
a plant with that gene.

Usually the fruit from such crosses is different enough from
the fruit of the indeterminate parent that it is obvious in
the F1 that you have a crossed plant, but a farmer growing
thousands of them for seed might not notice the F1 and simply
save its seeds right along with the uncrossed seeds. If the
farmer grows out those saved F1 seeds in a subsequent seed
crop, you could get F2 plants from seeds that the farmer saved
from the crop that included the F1 plants. (The F1 *plants*
probably looked just like the uncrossed indeterminate, because
a dwarf gene in the F1 is recessive. You would not see a smaller
plant until the F2 generation, when you could get plants with
a "homozygous" recessive-recessive pair for the dwarf gene.)