The written word - a tomato bible

[snugglekitten]

After perusing amazon for quite some time I have seen a plethora of cheap DIY tomato books, but I am looking for something deeper.

I want a book for tomatoes as what E.O. Wilson did for ants or what Clausewitz did for war.

Does such a book approximate this wish?

If so, interested minds want to know.


thanks!

-SK

[habitat_gardener]

The best tomato book I own is 100 Heirloom Tomatoes for the American Garden by Carolyn Male (1999), who is carolyn137 here.

Another tomato expert at Tomatoville, nctomatoman, wrote a book that will be coming out in January: Epic Tomatoes by Craig LeHoullier
http://www.amazon.com/Craig-LeHoullier/e/B00JDSEARE

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by snugglekitten

After perusing amazon for quite some time I have seen a plethora of cheap DIY tomato books, but I am looking for something deeper.

I want a book for tomatoes as what E.O. Wilson did for ants or what Clausewitz did for war.

Does such a book approximate this wish?

If so, interested minds want to know.


thanks!

-SK

SK, i don't know what Wilson did for ants and I've read many history books about wars in many places fought at many times.

Could you be a bit more specific as to what you're looking for that you are calling a tomato Bible?

Perhaps then, I could help.

Carolyn

[KarenO]

If you want an actual paper and binding book, the aforementioned ones are probably the best. For myself, I get my information mainly via computer. If I want information about any tomato variety I generally go to Tatiana's Tomatobase. For everything else tomato related, here is where I go
KO

[Worth1]

Carolyn's book is one and I am sure Craig's new book will surpass it as hard as that is to believe.
It seems the rest of the gardening books on the shelf are picture books and books about growing pot.

Worth

[snugglekitten]

Thanks for the responses, guys. I guess I am looking more for a book of a practitioner in the art of growing/breeding instead of consuming. I think this book is still waiting to be written. I like the hard data!

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by snugglekitten

Thanks for the responses, guys. I guess I am looking more for a book of a practitioner in the art of growing/breeding instead of consuming. I think this book is still waiting to be written. I like the hard data!

SK, I'll be back tomorrow for some suggestions for you, but two questions first.

Do you intend to breed primarly OP varieties , initial cross with just two parents ?

If F1 hybrids do you intend to cross just two parents initially, or do you intend to breed in various disease tolerances, which would usually require setting up two separate breeding lines?

Thanks,

Carolyn, who also notes that this website is not set up just for consumption of tomatoes if you look at some of the specialized Forums here where there are many practitioners, both professional commercial and amateur, of both breeding and growing tomatoes, and many hundreds who have lots of expertise in growing as well as Disease ID's and more/

[carolyn137]

I'm doing a second post rather than editing my one above. TV tennis from Canada is over for tonight and as I sat there I remembered somethong you wrote in your first post in TownHall,which was;

(Hello I am a tomato breeder.

American living in Poland.)

So you already are a tomato breeder, not that you want to become one.If so, then you've already bred some tomato varieties and therefore I am having problems wondering why you want a book that tells you how to breed tomatoes and also grow them, as you said above.

There are as many ways of growing tomatoes as there are persons growing them IMO/

I know I can answer you better if I know what you have bred, and then most of my questions in my above post are redundant since you already are a tomato breeder.

What specific additional information would you like to know about tomato breeding that you don't already know?

That way I know others who are reading here, as well as myself,could help you better..And there is no one book that would help/

Want to know more about what genes in tomatoes and what they control, I can give you a link for that/

You probably know all about genetic segregation, and how to make crosses but I could give you a link for that.

Have questions about selecting parental inputs for a specfic goal? The Crosstalk Forum is where you want to go to ask the opinions of the breeders already here at Tville/

Hope to hear from you soon so we can get on the right track here.

Carolyn

[snugglekitten]

Hello Carolyn,

Thanks for your response.

I hope I answer all of your questions in the following:

I breed out unique OP germoplasm cultivars from my own crosses exculsively for crossing and back crossing with other OP varieties and with each other.

I am going for the highly elusive "taste" categoy which is difficult because it relies on a mixture of genes and not a single one, not to mention the phenotypic-environmental variables, as in dry farming often increases taste for example.

That being said, taste can never be a primary categoy because any new breed has to be competitive with other cultivars in yield:

Yield. —
Unless a new cultivar has a yield potential equal to or exceeding that of current cultivars, it generally cannot be successful even if it may contain other improved characteristics. Because selection for yield per se is seldom very effective, breeders often define individual components that contribute to yield and emphasize selection for those attributes.

I still think a niche market for tasty cultivars can exist with the right marketing/logistics, it will be competing with staples like brandywine, a large hurdle to overcome.

Aside from breeding for taste, I am interested in another project: breeding for resistence against cuscutae. Right now the issue I have with this project would be lack of time/space and also the issue of collecting cuscutae for lab experiments as the import of seed is limited.

I am a complete amateur breeder, engineer by trade, and it will probably take me another few years of work to actually make something that passes my personal view of market-readiness, and therefore even longer before facing the entire process of market selection could begin.

I think experience is always the best way to get good at something, but when a general can pass on information to a private about best practices, it can often make the learning curve a lot less frustrating.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by snugglekitten

Hello Carolyn,

Thanks for your response.

I hope I answer all of your questions in the following:

I breed out unique OP germoplasm cultivars from my own crosses exculsively for crossing and back crossing with other OP varieties and with each other.

I am going for the highly elusive "taste" categoy which is difficult because it relies on a mixture of genes and not a single one, not to mention the phenotypic-environmental variables, as in dry farming often increases taste for example.

That being said, taste can never be a primary categoy because any new breed has to be competitive with other cultivars in yield:





I still think a niche market for tasty cultivars can exist with the right marketing/logistics, it will be competing with staples like brandywine, a large hurdle to overcome.

Aside from breeding for taste, I am interested in another project: breeding for resistence against cuscutae. Right now the issue I have with this project would be lack of time/space and also the issue of collecting cuscutae for lab experiments as the import of seed is limited.

I am a complete amateur breeder, engineer by trade, and it will probably take me another few years of work to actually make something that passes my personal view of market-readiness, and therefore even longer before facing the entire process of market selection could begin.

I think experience is always the best way to get good at something, but when a general can pass on information to a private about best practices, it can often make the learning curve a lot less frustrating.

Thanks for explaining where you are coming from.

Yes, there are many factors/variables that play into the taste of a variety, but the primary determinates are the genes that an accession has.

And yes,yield is also a factor,but primarily for those who are commercial. Not always, but usually.

(but when a general can pass on information to a private about best practices, it can often make the learning curve a lot less frustrating.)

Agreed, and in which case I suggest you go to the Crosstalk Forum and explain what you want to do and why, and let the many breeders help you. Some are professional breeders who have varieties already placed in several commercial seed websites/catalogs,others are so called amateurs, who are far from being amateurs, some are home growers breeding varieties just for fun and asking for advice, some are owners of companies/websites,who do their own breeding and offer new varieties at their websites, most of those are noted in the Seed and Plant Resource Forum, and I was going to list some for you, but won't unless you want me to, in other words a nice cross section of folks with experiences ranging from just starting to already there as competitive in the world wide market.

Long sentence, above, sorry about that.

So go to that Forum. This is not the best time of the year for many of the more experienced folks to post b'c they are so busy with their own breeding projects but fingers crossed some will be able to help now and in the future.

I had to lookup the word cuscutae, but I know it as dodder, and of all the years I've been posting at message sites, going back to 1982 I've not seen ONE diagnosis of dodder. Is it a special problem in Poland, b'c I know it's not so here in the US.

Hope the above helps,

Carolyn

[snugglekitten]

Thanks Carolyn,

I read a lot on these forums.

Dodder plants, I heard, are in issue in Florida, but breeding for any resistence is interesting to me.