I’m staring intently at my F1 true leaves every day and can’t yet decide what I’m seeing. I have potato leaf and carrot leaf (and regular leaf, but that won’t do much) crossed with RL, PL, and CL. Plus I have dwarf crossed with full size and dwarf crossed with sweet cheriette. A couple were pollen dusted but not emasculated but most were emasculated and since these are some of my first manual cross grow-outs I keep feeling like it must have gone wrong somehow. I also have no idea how CL genetics work in heterogenous crosses with PL or RL.
I can’t wait until they get bigger and end this suspense.
I’m also watching my exserted orange pollen trap row seedlings from 2021 with great interest. These were a separate row in between trial rows but not interplanted within the row. I’m hoping they grabbed some fun pollen but didn’t know to interplant right next to each other at the time so we’ll see.
Meanwhile my individual favourite selections from the promiscuous 2021 tomatoes, both of which were very firm fruits, have segregated into large and small plants. The 2021 and 2022 promiscuous seedlings are both showing a couple much more vigorous plants, and the GTS seed is also looking pretty vigorous.
Purple fruited varieties (and some others) tend show up “problems” with purple under leaves where as yellow fruited go paler to yellow leafes easier. Kinda like canary in a coal mine except that here there isn’t big problems, but it’s never perfect. They will loose it later once they are more established and conditions are more suitable. One year I overwatered one purple fruited variety so that leaves were completely purple top and bottom . I thought I had found some special variety, but after transplanting it went to (blueish) green within a week.
All my F1 manual crosses except the minsk early x mikado black have easy way to distinguish whether they worked: different leaves, dwarfing, etc. Looks like they all have, though there are a couple PL mixed in there too, indicating the ones I didn’t emasculate did self-pollinate some-but-not-all their seeds.
Inspired by @WilliamGrowsTomatoes planting some non-optimal seeds and getting results I also planted a Taiga cross I’d made. The fruit was little and malformed, and I’d put it on the countertop last September to ripen but it never appeared to ripen or change in any way. Early this month I cut it open (it did not look like a tomato that had sat on a countertop all winter, but neither did it look super edible or ripe) and fermented the seeds. Well, two of them are up! I can’t remember the other parent, probably minsk early or mikado black. We’ll see if it comes out with Taiga’s PL anyhow. Super excited, Taiga is one of my favourites.
Actually I’m super excited about all of this.
The promiscuous batches look happy and lively. There doesn’t appear to be a ton of diversity in my saved promiscuous plants but we’ll see.
It’s not quite same as stress purpling although reason is same, it just comes a lot easier with certain types of tomatoes. If stress is high most get it, but if it’s just barely only some. I just went trough mine and first I found that was indiqo queen.
At least three of them are promiscuous descendents.
The promiscuous stuff i saved here in both 2021 and 2022 is looking pretty uniform. The gts seeds have produced less uniform plants and there are some fun curly ones in the EFN lofthouse mixes.
Fancy heirlooms were planted a couple days later and are noticably slower.
F1s all took (I tended to move anther rings instead of pollen, might be why sweet cherriette worked). Very excited.
Also I’m not really doing these under lights apparently. They’re a little stretchy but I’m carrying them in and out already, it’s just suddenly a hot spring, and that will slow them down. The west window gets a lot of light. Benefits of doing minimal-age transplants.
@Greenstorm i am late to this party and possibly too late to be helpful, but I grew peruvianum received from Julia last year and have seed, if you’d like some. I’m coastal California, a bit warmer than Julia.
I know I contributed some seed that has this purple leaf trait, not a function of stress. Some even have more purple! these came from a single plant of “Perfection in Pink” from wild mountain seeds that was off-type. They were prettier and bigger and tastier than the rest.
I’ll catalogue what actually gets planted, but it’s going in within the next day or two. My water is waiting to be fixed and the soil is pretty dry, so we’ll see how it all goes.
Turns out the last frost was probably 3 weeks ago but this is the traditional date. The soil will be warm at least.
Very excited about a lot of these, and finally remembered to separate out the colours.
Also can’t wait to see how the sibling grow-outs do.
Just an additional idea for you short season gardeners: Last season, I saved cuttings from my favorite tomato plants, put them in small pots in front of a window, watered them once every couple of weeks, and once in a while cut off all the leaves (except for the top growth). The goal of removing the leaves was to a) reduce evaporation and thus frequent watering b) reduce growth c) keep things non-chaotic. The leafless stems were twirled around a piece of bamboo stuck in the pot to make the growth manageable.
Of the 8, 1 died suddenly and 1 I culled because it started looking sickly.
When planting season came, I had 6 plants, some of which were 5 feet tall, so I drilled a 2 feet hole and buried the whole stem underground, ready to become root. All seem to be doing well, some are already flowering.
I did not contribute to the EFN mix but can confirm some tomatoes just have purple leaf backs.
Different from the stress response, some keep purple leaf backs long term, with no other signs of stress.
Seen in some Wild Mountain tomatoes, and something I got from ??? and labelled “purple ruffle” last year that laughs in the face of late blight- both in last years plants and this year’s from saved seed.
All of the purple leaf tomatoes seem to shrug off cool weather pretty happily. We had an early spring this year- most of my tomatoes have been hardening outdoors in a warm pocket 5 weeks before my estimated last frost date(May 20th), transplanted into cooler garden 2-3 weeks before last frost date. They havent had to deal with actual frost but several nights juuuust above freezing. They’re doing great.
Related: Many are now flowering, and yesterday I spotted itty bitty fruit set on the purple ruffle, coyote, sungold and some of the Wild Mountain cherries. If I can get fresh garden tomatoes before June 19th that’ll be a new record
. I thought I had found some special variety, but after transplanting it went to (blueish) green within a week.
