So true. I want to taste the promiscuous tomato flavors people describe, in their adapted habitat! Not in one where they can barely survive, if at all!
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Maybe but that is one reason we are a community. Mark sent me some and I will make short season crosses with them. Those crosses will likely go back to Mark and off to Julia and come back to me stronger.
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What a joy and a privilege to be part of this!
I’m still so curious to see what they’ll do here though.
That should be easy. How is bicolour a single?How do tricolours work? I need a long bath with a tomato breeding textbook.
Yeah I don’t know but I think there is a single bicolor gene. I don’t know how tricolors work. I guess my working mental model is that certain colors just sort of slush into a tricolor. I think Brad’s Atomic Grape is a tricolor and I crossed it in last year so the F2 might be telling in 2024.
I swear, half the reason I do this is because I want to know what happens.
Okay, zeroing on my tomatoes for this year. I’m doing this by use-category, which means some varieties will overlap between different categories. This post is complimentary to my project forks above. My promiscuous tomatoes have lost a lot of diversity in the plants and fruit forms and scents over two years of selection for ripening, so I’m going to be more deliberate about this and start combining flavour genes, earliness genes, and try and maintain good flower architecture. I’m also sort of trialling a grow of this size. This is pre-landracing, if you like: creating enough breadth that selecting for earliness doesn’t lose me both flower architecture and flavour, and giving myself assurance that the flavours I like are in there somewhere. This is well over 400 plants, so I’m also testing for my ability to manage that many; last year ended up being roughly 200 -250 plants.
While putting this together I realize I often like the flavours of hearts better than other shapes, which seems odd but there you are.
First, there’s a collection of well-flavoured tomatoes that probably will not ripen a single tomato, but that I will take pollen from to cross into shorter-season plants for their flavour and colour. I will grow 1-2 instances of each of these, see which ones survive in the cold, produce pollen (not much produces pollen up here), and which ones have good flower architecture. I don’t expect to use pollen from all of these but I’m giving myself lots so I can choose nice-looking flowers and plants. Possibly some of them will ripen fruit here, and then they can move into a more official trial next year.
I’d like these to be clearly labeled, but using the permaculture zone system it can be a zone 2.5 or whatever: doesn’t need daily observation, but wants to be visited every couple days to once a week when I look for pollen, then ignored till fall when I look to see if anything ripened, just in case. 1-2 individuals of each.
Black Prince
Black Sea Man
Boronia
Dwarf chocolate champion
Mr Brown
Northern elan
Giant Fiolet
Kiss the sky
Longhorn
Violet Noir
Gunmetal grey
Bayou moon
Big green dwarf
Evergreen
Green grape
Kiwi
Malachite box
Marmande verte
Krasnaya mishen
Wagner blue green
Black strawberry
Bunte pflaume
Dwarf blazing beauty
Island Sunrise
Hill marmande
Varieties or groups I’m trialling. These have a reasonable chance of actually growing here, or they’re something I’m very curious about. They want to be somewhere I can observe, and I’d like to keep the components of a group together. Aside from just ripening, I’m looking for good plant shape, flavour even in my climate, some size on the fruit, good flower architecture, or some combination of the above. These want reliable labels on the new individuals, but many of the sibling and promiscuous groups don’t need such a thing. 2-3 individuals of each, group #s dependent on group project.
Baby black beefsteak
Boronia
Bundaberg rumball - last year it was in the shade and seeded late, re-trialling
Northern elan - cold resistance?
Gunmetal grey
Bayou moon - unlikely to do well but it was grown not far away
Saucy Mary - last year it was in the shade and seeded late, re-trialling
Sungreen - who knew sungold has a green sibling? V excited
Black strawberry
Uluru ochre - last year it was in the shade and seeded late, re-trialling
Island sunrise
Sungold - I’ve actually never grown this up here somehow
Big hill - I’m trying this again because I feel like it should be able to ripen here
Kim’s civil war oxheart
Sunpeach - another sungold sibling, sounds fun
San francisco fog cold climate - maybe I should just send these to @julia.dakin , unless she has them already?
Finger lakes long and round paste (3 individuals from each type: long and round)
Grandma mary
Green plum (Small Island)
Hill marmande
Mark reed’s large
Moskovitch
Santiam
Blue ambrosia
Mission Mountain Sunrise
Yellow estonian grape
Wisconsin gold
Promiscuous group subgroups:
- Round firm green bicolour (best taste 2021) sibling group (grow 6-10)
- Other tasty promiscuous 2021 sibling group (grow 6-10)
- Yellow with green flecks (earliest 2022) sibling group (grow 6)
- Yellow-green bicolour early 2022 (grow 6)
- NOT 2022 saved seed grow-out, this wasn’t very diverse
- 2021 saved seed grow-out looking for good flowers and flavours, record % of plants that ripen fruit (grow 30-40, assess for diversity)
- Original EFN promiscuous BH - trying a couple from the original packet looking for good flowers and flavours (grow 6, close to 2021 promiscuous)
- Original EFN promiscuous Q - trying a couple from the original packet looking for good flowers and flavours (grow 6, close to 2021 promiscuous)
- Original EFN promiscuous wildling - trying a couple from the original packet looking for good flowers and flavours (grow 12, close to 2021 promiscuous)
Currant group (2 of each) includes:
- Orange currant
- Matt’s wild cherry
- Humboldt wild
- Beach cherry
- Copper currant (if I can get the site to work and send me seeds!)
- Coyote
- Ildi
- Puerto cortes
- Sweet cheriette
“Going to seed” swap group (I think these are @WilliamGrowsTomatoes’ s), grow half the packet
Karen Olivier group (grow 3-5 of each) includes:
- Cowboy
- KARMA purple MF
- KARMA purple
- Polaris
- Chinook
- Emerald city
- Sweet baby jade
- KARMA miracle
- KARMA peach
- Ruby slippers
- Yellow brick road
- Taiga
Grocery store green cherry F3 & F4 group (grow 20-30 this year)
Zesty green crosses group, I did lots of pollen-dusting on flowers, plus I have some various F2 & F3 seeds. These might be best together and not in with the KARMA group, though I suspect this is an offtype of KARMA miracle. (grow 20-30)
F1s, grouped by parentage. Especially multiple seeds from non-emasculated flowers will be grown in groups. (grow 2 from each emasculated cross, group of each non-emasc)
Pollen receivers will be in pots on my balcony, so I can easily do my crosses. These ideally have a trait (PL or dwarf) so I can tell early they’ve been crossed., and they ripen in my area. I will also do on-the-fly crosses in my garden but I find it difficult to keep those labelled, and I’m less inclined to do them. Many of these have some level of exsertion or are good reliable friends. Plan is to grow 2 of each.
KO Sweet Baby Jade (RL, but dwarf and green and the plant just will not die, cross with good-architecture promiscuous, mission mountain if it does well, exserted orange, attention to size and flower architecture)
KARMA miracle (green, PL, ripens here, excellent flavour, has pretty open flowers IIRC, cross with an early with good flower architecture-type promiscuous maybe from the select groups, exserted orange, rozovaya bella, jd’s special c-tex)
Mikado black (black, PL, big fruit, ripens here but touch-and-go, has pretty open flowers, again with exserted orange and flower architecture)
Uralskiy ranniy (small red dwarf, RL, very early, universal receiver for the Big List and also for Mikado Black and KARMA Miracle, chosen from the red-earlies because of the nice upright dwarf plant shape)
KARMA purple MF (purple PL, ripens, good flavour, often has weird flowers, general receiver)
Zesty green (green heart PL, ripens, tastes amazing, has exposed stigmas for the most part, universal receiver and a major focus)
Maya and Sion (red, PL, accidental cross between stupice and brandiwine so shows some tendency towards crossing, tasty. Good universal receiver)
Lime green salad (earliest green dwarf but not ultra early. Use for earliness in marginally-ripening but well-flavoured varieties like Rozovaya Bella or Saucy Mary for easy wins; don’t fold into promiscuous since the taste isn’t phenominal yet)
Promiscuous firm tasty green, exserted orange, other tasty promiscuous 2021, early promiscuous from 2022, any promiscuous or Mission Mountain with outstanding flower architecture gets a cutting taken and comes to live in this section (universal receiver, every time it flowers I put something fun on it, I’m absolving myself from record-keeping my particular crosses from this group because it will get a bunch of pollen from the non-ripeners)
KARMA purple MF (PL, tasty, early, nice plant shape, this is more of a whim)
Sungold, sungreen, sunpeach (primarily using to self, for the F2s, but may add pollen. Besides, who doesn’t want these on the deck for snacking?)
Silvery Fir Tree (Carrot leaf red that’s mid-my-season and reliable with a good plant size and shape. Universal receiver, F1 results of these crosses will be crossed with good flower architecture plants)
Food, because they’re somewhat reliable and tasty. At this point a lot of these are duplicates, so may not have their own space, but I want to ensure that if I don’t plant at least a couple of each that they get in somewhere so I can eat them. I want to make sure I have 4-6 of each of these in the garden somewhere.
JD’s special c-tex
Mikado black
Rozovaya bella
Tasty black cherries mix
KARMA purple MF
KARMA purple
Grocery store green F3 F4
Lime green salad
Zesty green various
KA sweet baby jade
Promiscuous firm tasty green
KARMA miracle
Sungold
Maya and Sion
Minsk early
Moravsky div
Principe borghese
Silvery Fir Tree
Sweet cheriette
Uralskiy Ranniy
Patch of “will they grow from last year’s drops” direct seed promiscuous trial
A comment on earliness of things when grown in my garden:
Big Hill latest
Exserted Orange Earlier
Mission Mountain Sunrise Even Earlier
Sweet Cherriette Earliest
A comment on what I sent in tomato wise to the seed exchange:
I think I may have sent some XL Red as it was is an interesting strain of Joseph’s promiscuous project that I have a lot of seed for. Then I sent in some Lofthouse Panormous Direct Seeded I grew (I had already sent some back to Joseph). It is a different sub-strain of Joseph’s project and seems to have heavy Brad influence. I expect the two strains were mixed together for the promiscuous seed. I may have also sent something entirely of mine like the Mission Mountain Rising project aka MMM X Aztek which I saved a lot of seed from for the F2 grow out next year and would hope went in the domestic mix and not the promiscuous but who knows?
Oh, this is super interesting! I get a couple sweet cherriette, then a pause, then a bunch of exserted orange. Maybe Mission Mountain Sunrise will do well here.
What % of the tomatoes you’ve tried/ that you grow ripen before Exserted Orange, roughly?
I would say that the 10 or so tomatoes on my multiyear list of earliest which does not include exserted orange are all earlier than exserted orange.
Percentage wise I couldn’t call it but if I have tried 250 tomatoes ten would be what 4%? My math method was that 10 is 1% of 1000 so * 4 for 1/4 of 1000. I haven’t substitute taught math in 9 or 10 months so I might be getting rusty again.
Hmm looks like if I edit my list a bit, I have 17 possibilities for earlier than Exserted Orange, so maybe closer to 8%?! Though I am not certain about all of them being shorter than Exserted Orange for sure. A significant amount of Exserted Orange’s evolution in my garden was in the NW isolation garden which like all the western gardens is just below the big hill and the land kind of rolls down into a dip there so it is a frost pocket. Exserted Orange was pretty much fine with that though did come back from frost damage at least one of the years. Exserted Orange also isn’t inbred yet and also from some of the feedback especially the F3 growout for the seeds that went to Experimental Farm Network was not monophyletic in that some folks indicated outcrosses with blue skinned tomatoes. Which would have been in the F2 the year before. Some of those blue skinned tomatoes might have been Mission Mountain Sunrise. I think if I had selected MMM for earliness alone I probably would have gotten an ultra-early red with no bicolor and no blue. It may or may not have ended up as potato leaf. I think though that if I ran another earliness test this might be my testing pool and maybe would need to grow a few exserted orange to see where they fall- but that doesn’t seem like a super high priority unless maybe I decide to try to breed a tomato earlier than Sweet Cherriette someday.
Earl’s Jagodka
Sweet Cherriette
Tumbler F1
Sungold F2
Coyote
Krainiy Sever
42 days
Anmore dewdrop
Betalyuks
Brad
Terrior Cheesemanii
Wild Child
Exserted Tiger
Pinnochio
Mission Mountain Sunrise
Lizzano F1
Solanum pimpinellifolium
Oh, and I don’t think I really get much of a pause with Sweet Cherriette though by the time they are super plentiful I’ve already switched to larger tomatoes. I think a tomato has to be at least Saladette sized or thereabouts to hold my interest for the whole season. I get tired of picking the little bitty ones except directly into my mouth or what my wife will eat in a week.
Hm, this is tempting me to add 42 days and anmore dewdrop to my tests (i have them already), but it’s just more little round reds, no?
I’m very curious to see where coyote, sungold, sweet cherriette, and MMS fall out this year. My attempts to record first blossom and first ripe fruit on things will be challenged this year but surely I’ll manage the first dozen or two?
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Now that I have finally managed a cross with Sweet Cherriette I could see Anmore Dewdrop or 42 Days playing a role in an attempt to gain back just a little size but maintain earliness.
However, for flavor and maintaining earliness I think Coyote or the Terrior strain of Cheesemanii might make good crosses.
I think my record keeping system is just blogging away on the OSSI forum. So I guess I picked the grow more tomatoes button.
We’ll see if coyote does an off flavour for me. My hope is to get… you know, I think I’m just following in your footsteps with the MMS. Test the earlies, work on a decent flower architecture on something tasty enough that will ripen, then try to work it earlier without losing flavour. I’m on step 2, try to get decent flavours with good flower architrcture, you’re way past me.
I’m not truly happy if I can’t do a sketch graph, or compare data somehow.
I think my biggest advance recently was crossing MMS to BH or HX-9 to get MMM and I decided not to stop work to stabilize it and then made lots of MMM crosses in the F2.
I may be able to pull something even better out of the Mission Mountain Early project MMM x Sweet Cherriette and or the Mission Mountain Rising project MMM x Aztek micro dwarf in the F2 grow outs this year.
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I really like the idea of working in that space of generative chaos, crossing F1s and F2s with more F1s and F2s with unstable lines etc. It’s so exciting!
It’s interesting seeing what you guys are planning for your tomatoes. It’s going to be fun to see how seed from William does for me here.
I’ve definitely been crossing F1’s and F2’s. There is a balancing act though between trait stabilization and crossing. Like for my potato leaf to regular leaf outcrossing cycle I really need to grow the F2 to find the plants with the best exsertion. Then those plants are the ones with the most natural crosses so stabilizing exsertion of stigma it might take a few generations.
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Quick rundown of what I planted today. I keep running out of labels and stopping-- bad planning on my part. Getting it down for record keeping purposes. More greens, blacks, earlies, and currants tomorrow.
60 “kinds”/360 individuals so far.
Kind / # of individuals / project
Kind - # of individuals - Group
jd’s special c-tex - 2 - crossing
kiss the sky - 2 - crossing
longhorn - 2 - crossing
maya & sion’s airdrie special - 2 - crossing
native sun - 2 - crossing
ron’s carbon copy (2021) - 2 - crossing
rozovaya bella (2021) - 2 - crossing
sugary pounder - 2 - crossing
big green dwarf - 2 - dwarf
boronia - 2 - dwarf
bundaberg rumball - 2 dwarf
chocolate champion - 2 - dwarf
saucy mary - 3 - dwarf
uluru ochre - 3 - dwarf
chinook - 2 - olivier
cowboy - 2 - olivier
emerald city - 2 - olivier
karma apricot - 2 - olivier
karma miracle - 6 - olivier
karma peach - 2 - olivier
karma pink - 2 - olivier
karma purple multiflora - 4 - olivier
polaris - 2 - olivier
ruby slippers - 2 - olivier
sweet baby jade - 2 - olivier
taiga - 6 - olivier
yellow brick road - 2 - olivier
mikado black 2022 - 6 - population
grocery store green F2 - 18 - project
karma miracle x sweet cheriette (NE) F1 - 6 - project
karma purple x silvery fir (NE) F1 - 6 - project
minsk early x zesty green F1 - 6 - project
silvery fir x mikado black F1 - 6 - project
sweet baby jade x unknown mini F1 - 6 - project
uluru ochre x mikado black F1 - 6 - project
zesty green x silvery fir F1 - 6 - project
#2 promisc orange - 6 - promisc
big hill - 6 - promisc
exserted orange 2021 - 12 - promisc
promisc “a” early-mid Aug 2021 - 48 - promisc
promisc #2 - 6 - promisc
promisc bh series - 6 - promisc
promisc gone to seed - 12 - promisc
promisc green freckles - 6 - promisc
promisc orange/red bicolour - 12 - promisc
promisc q-series - 6 - promisc
promisc tasty firm bicolour - 12 - promisc
promisc weird green berry tropical - 18 - promisc
promisc wildling - 6 - promisc
promiscuous 2022 - 30 - promisc
atomic sunset - 2 - test
bayou moon - 2 - test
black strawberry - 2 - test
brad’s atomic grape - 2 - test
brown and black boar - 2 - test
finger lakes long - 6 - test
finger lakes round - 6 - test
gunmetal grey - 2 - test
mark reed’s large - 4 - test
moonstone - 2 - test
zesty small green - 12 - test (outcrossing)
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Final tomatoes:
#2 promisc orange
42 days
anmore treasure
atomic sunset
bayou moon
beach cherry
big green dwarf
big hill
black from tula
black prince
black sea man
black strawberry
boronia
brad F2
brad’s atomic grape
brown and black boar
bundaberg rumball
bundte pflaume
chinook
chocolate champion
cowboy
coyote
danko
emerald city
emerald pear
estonian grape
exserted orange 2021
finger lakes long
finger lakes round
giant fiolet
golden currant
green grape
green plum
grocery store green F2
gunmetal grey
humboldtii wild
ildi
island sunrise
jaded cherry
jd’s special c-tex
kardinal tchyovskyi
karma apricot
karma miracle
karma miracle x sweet cheriette (NE) F1
karma peach
karma pink
karma purple multiflora
karma purple x silvery fir (NE) F1
kim’s civil was oxheart
kiss the sky
kiwi
krasnaya mishen green
longhorn
malachite box
margaret curtain
mark reed large
matt’s wild
maya & sion’s airdrie special
mikado black 2022
minsk early x zesty green F1
mint julep
moonstone
native sun
orange currant
outdoor girl
polaris
promisc “a” early-mid Aug 2021
promisc #2
promisc bh series
promisc gone to seed
promisc green freckles
promisc orange/red bicolour
promisc q-series
promisc tasty firm bicolour
promisc weird green berry tropical
promisc wildling
promiscuous 2022
puerto cortes
ron’s carbon copy (2021)
rozovaya bella (2021)
ruby slippers
sasha’s altai
saucy mary
shoshone
silvery fir
silvery fir x mikado black F1
soul patch
sugary pounder
sungold
sungreen
sunpeach
sweet baby jade
sweet baby jade x unknown mini F1
sweet cheriette
taiga
uluru ochre
uluru ochre x mikado black F1
yellow brick road
yellow purple wild
zesty green x silvery fir F1
zesty small green
Then a unknown mother x carbon F1, an unknown father x taiga F1, and Mission Mountain Sunrise will be planted today.
All my F1s are up already, I’m very excited about that.
I’m also super excited about my sibling group selections from my favourite of the promiscuous tomato herd; this is the first year I’m growing my selections from individual plants out separately rather than a general pot of “it tasted good and it ripened”. So I’m very curious to see whether all the offspring from my “weird green berry tropical” or “tasty firm bicolour” are similar to each other or to their parent, and whether if they are similar they still taste good in whatever weather we have this year. Some were selected during a very hot year and some during a very cold year, which I expect to change the results considerably.
My self-saved promiscuous seeds all sprung up immediately, barely waiting for me to cover them with soil. These are saved from both 2021 and 2022. I’ve only been saving my own tomato seeds for a few years so it’s super gratifying to see how well they do.
I need to work on my physical planting plan. Last year I did not put all my green-when-ripe tomatoes together and I again regretted it, but my organizational brain wants to separate by size, trial type, and use instead (like pollen donors on one area and sibling group tests in another). When I do that I never end up actually catching the green-when-ripes when they’re, well, ripe.
I notice the ravens pulled all the flags off my stake flag markers over the winter (thanks @WilliamGrowsTomatoes for that brilliant way of marking plants) so I’ll need to get new ones instead of re-using old ones.