Ah ok, so then it sounds like a move away from exsertion would… not be related then, to crossing ‘early and often’?
I just harvested a couple more fruits, attempts at crossing Island Sunrise (a mix of lyc., pimp., and che. and nicely exserted) with arcanum. Out of the 2 fruits, only 1 had 2 seeds. Now in a bag with wet paper, ready to germinate. I have hopefully 3 wilding X arcanum seedlings now growing, and some hopefully pimp X arc. and pimp X per. seeds just germinated. Fingers crossed for some exserted flowers coming up!
I also just harvested a fruit full of seeds that should be pimp X chmielewskii, the first of my chm. cross attempts that has given any seeds. I’ve searched the net looking for other people who have made chm. crosses but can’t find any examples, whether to domestics or other wilds, which surprises me since a) chm. smells amazing! Especially 1 of my 2 accessions. And b) it’s there in the cross chart saying it’s compatible as a pollen donor to lyc. pimp. che. and gal., so I would have expected it to be a popular thing to try, and for exsertion lovers especially so. Do we know of people making such crosses? I would have thought it would be valuable for this project.
No I stand by my statement about crossing to often but to succinctly rephrase my early and often: crossing to inserted varieties or species leads away from exsertion especially when done more than once without pausing a year or two to allow exsertion to segregate back out and stabilize a bit.
The Solanum chmielewskii? crosses sound neat. I think you have been very persistent in assembling a large number of species that many of us simply haven’t had in our collections. I haven’t tried that species.
I have to say, I can’t understand how the variable of crossing early [edit: oh… I was thinking that meant early in the season, but perhaps it means early in terms of F generations?], would affect this, though for sure totally understand how crossing with anything not exserted would have a negative impact, and maybe understand how crossing exserteds together before the trait is stabilised could cause trouble. So, perhaps I understand now.
It’s true I was quite persistent in getting things to cross with. The imminence of death spurred me on - I figured doing as much as I can in the first year would be advisable and give me more things to work with as I go forward. Plus I was expecting many things not to work out so to maximise future options, making as many and as varied cross attempts from the start seemed a good plan. It has certainly kept me quite busy! I’ll keep sharing as time goes on as to how these crosses go.
I’m growing ‘Columbianum’ which is supposed to be a Columbian landrace domestic that can, supposedly, act as a bridge for peruvianum. I made many cross attempts but only harvested 1 fruit so far, so I’m yet to see if there was any success there. Also I guess the term ‘landrace’ becomes questionable if we are not growing it in the land it’s from, and if we are not growing a sufficient population size. Though TGRC has some advice for maintaining genetic diversity of pimpinellifolium accessions which might apply well here - to grow a population of 75 and do cross pollination of all plants in the population using a bulk pollen sample. However, if we are receiving the seeds from a supplier who’s just been letting them self for generations, and only saving seeds from a small number of plants, then the bottleneck has already occurred.
The Heirloom Reviews guy sells a packet of mixed tomato seeds. Seeds he doesn’t even know what they are from due to mix up during processing. There’s also a chance I think to get natural hybrids that happened at his place. I direct sowed 100 seeds from him and kept probably the best 12 plants or so and there’s a range of plants and flower types. One potato leaf, one plant that grew quicker than the rest, one with extreme exsertion, another with also very good exsertion. He has a separate package for mixed larger tomatoes and mixed cherry tomatoes. Someone could order say 500 mixed cherry tomato seeds and plant each plant and screen for valuable traits.
Could take it one step further and contact him to see if we could pay him to screen his tomatoes for traits we want such as exsertion or large flowers. He might even do it for free as long you buy seeds. That would keep anyone who wants to breed with domestic tomatoes from having to test varieties and wasting space with undesirable plants.
There’s a next step. My initial thought was to gather as many potato leaf varieties as you could find and interplant them with Joseph’s promiscuous tomatoes. Then you could mass sow the potato leaf offspring and search for non potato leaf. Nature would have done the selection for flower promiscuity.
But seems like you could get the largest flowers and most exserted flowers varieties from this HR guy and interplant them with the promiscuous tomatoes. And maybe plant a bunch of flowers too to attract pollinators. I’m not sure if the promiscuous tomatoes will cross through pollinators to the domestics or if you have to manually make the cross. But anyway if that would work you could do some real progress on domestics and not have to do manual crosses.
Here’s pictures of the flowers from 2 different plants and a third plant with a strange looking tomato.
Seven years ago back in 2017 when I launched my direct seeded tomato project Joseph sent me seeds of a wide variety of things that might work. Including his then purely domestic landraces. One of the key takeaways of the project was that almost everything worked directly seeded in 2017. So of course the several strains of Joseph’s domestic landrace worked. They were mostly red short season tomatoes with mostly inserted stigmas. A far cry from where Joseph and I have come in the intervening years. They likely contained both known varieties that did well for Joseph like Brad and Jagodka and segregating hybrids. One plant from the mix became the occasionally exserted stigma potato leaf mother of my Mission Mountain tomato project. It may have been Brad or a relative as sometimes some of the segregants have had similar spots. I think I have seed stashed away from them even though the likelihood of growing it out again seems increasingly less. Less because we just have more interesting genetics to work with now!
Joseph’s Big Hill HX-9 attempt at a domestic with an open flower which I received in 2018 has been highly useful and Exserted Orange is very similar but orange. However, we switched over largely to Joseph’s wild species crosses by about 2020 when they started becoming elite and tasty again. Though I have a number of domestic lines in my Mission Mountain tomato project, though now most are descended from Big Hill only a small subset of Mission Mountain Morning my Mission Mountain Sunrise x Big Hill cross has gone through segregation and been reselected for exserted stigmas.
I am also in the early stages of doing another round of breeding with a strain of Solanum habrochaites- for which oddly I have some of the only crosses I’ve successfully made with Joseph’s interspecies hybrids. My F2 plants are all Solanum habrochaites LA2329 x Promiscuous and I have a very few plants of a F1 hybrid from that (Solanum habrochaites LA2329 X Promiscuous) x Mission Mountain Morning. For whatever reason though, those few F1 25% plants seem to be weak and slow with none of the vigour of the 50% plants. Several are in danger of being over grown by nearby plants and if I want more F1 seed I shall have to make the cross again. One of my thoughts with the new round is to avoid some of the inserted domestic genetics we used in the original project. However, one oddity of the LA2329 strain is that it does not have the best flowers amongst the various strains of Solanum habrochaites. The stigmas are only exserted a bit. It wasn’t chosen for its flowers though but for its known arthropod resistance.
Could it be worth crossing F1 of Solanum habrochaites LA2329 X Promiscuous with F1 of a sexier flowered hab. X Promiscuous or even just a sexier flowered hab, select the next or next next generation for arthropod resistance + god flowers, then cross the results with MMM, if you wanted to keep a higher wild genetics in the mix, or even just to counter the lower insertion?
Perhaps but it is most straightforward if you want something specific to go after it from a specific accession. So if I want arthropod resistance I need genes primarily from LA2329.
I think it is important to note that there is huge variation at the genetic level within habrochaites. Some habrochaites accessions are SC.
I have F1s of MMM x LA2329 and Big Hill x LA2329. I think since I am currently growing EO, perhaps for the final time, it makes sense to try for LA2329 x Exserted Orange for 2024 grow out.
I have both F1 and F2 promiscuous x LA2329 as I made the cross two years in a row. Technically they are 5/8 wild or if hab specifically 9/16th.
I would like to make a The One x LA2329. Possibly an R18 x LA2329 would bring in that awesome flower genetics.
I’m not attempting to breed tomatoes, but I am doing a multi-year trial of tomatoes from hot climates in an effort to find more favorites that will do well in my area. (Never mind that this year was notably cool and rainy through May and June - I may have to do a lot of repeating next year.)
However, all of you tomato breeders have me studying the flowers on my plants. To potentially help your projects, here are my observations:
Abu Rawan (Iraq, sets fruit a good 5 degrees warmer than anything I’ve ever grown): typical domestic flower
Isfahan (Iran) and Thessaloniki (Greece): these plants are rather encroaching on each other. Neither is flowering to speak of at the moment. A few weeks ago, one of them had some giant, promiscuous-type flowers. I think Thessaloniki, but I didn’t trace the stem down all the way.
Plate de Haiti (Haiti): typical domestic flower
Rippled Rinon Delight (Cuba): domestic-sized flower with open anthers and exposed stigma
Very nice. Have you tried Lucid Gem from Wild boar farms? Brad Gates says that’s the most heat tolerant tomato he knows of. I’m not sure how it does I’ve never grown it. I have a horrible time trying to grow tomatoes, they’re so finicky and fragile and I don’t know anyone where I live who gets tomatoes to survive the summer.
Also check out the Texas Wild Cherry tomato. Might be worth a try.
Here’s an updated picture of the flowers from one of my plants. The exsertion is so much it looks comical. I hope I can get ripe fruit from it.
Wow that’s so exserted! I wonder if that might actually make crossing harder? Or at least for some interspecial crosses, I wonder if it might, if that style is so much longer than the pollen has evolved to travel through.
What are the size of fruits of Texas wild cherry? Are they the same cherry tomato sizes as in stores or small peanut M&Ms sized? I’m looking for something good for Texas heat but larger fruits than currant tomatoes.
I’m not sure, I’m trialing them now. I started some a month or so ago, maybe I’ll get some fruits in a few months. You can go on nativeseeds.org, they have a picture of someone holding some in their hand. If mine turn out good I can report back.
I trialed a bunch of tomatoes this year and have been satisfied with none so far. There’s still a chance I find something decent but I’m not holding my breath.
For domestic tomatoes I guess I’m nearly down to gathering as much diverse seed as I can get and doing a mass direct seeding. The idea doesn’t really excite me much based on my results from this year but I might do it anyway cause it’s low effort. A few hundred separate lineages would maybe turn up some interesting stuff.
I didn’t plant Joseph’s promiscuous tomatoes this year because I was scared to direct seed them but next year I’m planting them one way or another. Those should be more promising. I might even just go ahead and direct seed some this weekend and hope for the best.
The situation we find ourselves in with tomatoes seems to be why Joseph started his project.
Those comically long styles would be great for making crosses without emasculation like I did with good success my first tomato breeding year in 2017. It might be difficult for a tomato with that long of styles to self as the stigmas are very far from the anthers. That can be temperature dependent in some strains of tomato- the style length can vary over time. In your post it looks like there might be flowers that have fallen off- look like empty sticks on the inflorescence. This could be due to poor pollination. You could fix that by hand pollinating- gather some pollen with a buzzing device like a electric toothbrush onto something like a sunglass lens and then dip the stigma (the receptive bit on the end of the style) into the pollen. Would also let you cross that variety with others at the same time.
It does make me want to purchase a packet of “Texas Wild Cherry” (Edit: oops the tomato pictured was not Texas Wild Cherry) as I think pre-breeding for long styles is a great way to increase the chances of outcrossing in tomatoes. Though I think I just made ~40 successful tomato crosses and would really like to devote most of my garden space to my own crosses going forward so collecting more varieties to breed with wasn’t in my plans- and I sent in the order…
