Dwarf tomatoes

Adaptation Projects Tomatoes
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I had emailed Craig… Dwarf tomato project guy… a while back and said I’d be happy to grow out tomatoes looking for more dwarf interesting plants. He followed up the other day that he’ll be mailing seeds. So I’m excited to see what he sends and what it turns out.

I’ve given myself space (on paper at least) for about 79 dwarf tomatoes. May knock that back to 40 depending on what he sent. I have alot of other tomatoes planned and other things I want to squeeze in. We’ll see.

I’m going to compare them to the other tomatoes and see if they are actually easier to manage with staking up etc. Last year I had a row of t posts with 4 strands of twine across them and one twine up at each plant. That worked pretty well but having to move the t posts will get annoying.
I’m hoping that dwarf plants will be maybe good enough to hold their own and if not, can I get by with just like the rebar type posts? I use them for sheep fence so they’d be useful aside from just tomatoes… they aren’t that pricey… easier to put in and out than t post…

I’m considering crossing dwarfs to the Promiscuous stuff as well. Dwarf x big hill. Dwarf x Exserted Orange. Dwarf x habrochaites. Dunno. Probably going to see how the plants are going before planning any manual pollinations.

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I really look forward to hearing how this goes!

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The best flavored tomato I’ve ever eaten was a dwarf variety. It’s called Mr snow. Unfortunately in my climate it is not very productive and seems extremely prone to disease. I usually grow it every year just so I can eat a few, but I typically only get two to three good tomatoes off of one plant.

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This season I’ve grown out about 30 dwarfs I got from Patrina (co-DTP instigator) without any stakes or trellising On the whole they fruit way too heavily to be self supporting, so they flopped everywhere, with a fair bit of crawling insect damage. Flavour was very good on every line. Some were a bit shy in production.

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I grow dwarf Mr. snow every year. It has an incredible fruit like taste. Production is low, but they don’t take much space. People really enjoy the dwarf plants I have found.

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I managed to make my first dwarf cross in the winter of 2021-2022 and grow out the F1 in 2022. Mission Mountain Morning F1 x Aztek micro dwarf. I have four dwarf F2 plants from the cross that I am making crosses with. It is kind of fun! I have some other dwarf crosses in the F1, so should have several lines segregating out dwarfs in 2024. Also am making some new crosses with dwarfs.

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Maybe cross it with something that grows really well for you, and see if you can select for offspring that will give you the flavor you love and better survivability?

Since you’re planning to grow Mr. Snow every year, I bet backcrossing the healthiest plants from such a cross to Mr. Snow every year would be a great way to achieve that goal.

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I have several new dwarf crosses I am excited about for 2024. Some of my favorites are crosses with Payette and Sandpoint dwarf tomatoes from Idaho State Universities tomato breeding program. They were supposed to be resistant to a viral disease curly top virus from some early modern tomato breeding with wild species- and then somehow they ended up dwarf. It makes me feel like I am restarting the regional tomato breeding program which was last done by Art Boe who worked at both Idaho State and North Dakota State and last released a tomato variety in 1990 from North Dakota State.

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I got several more crosses made with my Payette crosses in 2024- though the new crosses may have too much Solanum habrochaites in them to be palatable any time soon.

Amongst my best flavored segregation project of Joseph’s promiscuous project some tasty potato leaf anthocyanin skinned dwarfs segregated out in 2024 and I hope that I’ll be able to raise more of them in 2025.

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Bumping this post because I’m growing lots of dwarfs and some micro dwarfs this year. I bought the pointy pinchers to hand cross pollinate! So fingers crossed!

I’m new to hand pollinating so this is a rambling of wishes until I see how successful I actually am with it. :face_with_peeking_eye: I hope to narrow down the possibilities as I see what plants do best and which tomatoes we like best.

I posted in my ongoing thread last year about the micro dwarfs being pretty blah. Rosey finch was by far the winner. Produced the most of the micros. Tomatoes looked like regular grape tomatoes and had some flesh to them, not all watery. And supposedly 55 days. I am going to do my best to track what days they first flower and first tomato picked.

I’m trying dwarf Geranium Kiss again, which has traits I like on paper. But last year I had few seedlings from the seeds planted, then lost the single surviving plant not long into growing it. This year I have 1 plant out of 5 seeds planted. If it dies I’m over it and will probably put the packet in the swap box for others to try. - IF - it manages to make it, which it is a nice healthy plant as if now, I want to make crosses with it, which will hopefully help get over whatever it doesn’t like about me. :joy:

Geranium Kiss is supposed to be determinant, but lots of people online talk about it having a regular det. flush but then it continues to produce like an indeterminate. 65 days. Golf ball size, red fruit.

And three potato leaf varieties that will hopefully be the mothers of many crosses this year.

Dw Gloria’s treat. 75 days. Bicolor.

Dw stoney brook heart. 80 days. Red.

Dw summer sunrise. 80 days. Yellow.

I hope to cross all three with m dw rosey finch to get shorter DTM offspring. Same for Geranium Kiss, if it does ok.

I hope to cross all three with Galapagos improved. Which would make them half wild. Plus the offspring should sort out regular leaf, potato leaf, and carrot leaf. And sort out red, bicolor, yellow, orange flesh.

All three PL and m dw Rosey finch with Blue beech. Try for a paste tomato that doesn’t hate me or lose 60+% of the fruit to blossom end rot.

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My experience with breeding tomatoes is that they are generally much easier to work with than beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), which so far has been the most difficult one to cross due to the small flower size and unique structures they have. I use a regular tweezers that I have sharpened to a point. One point is sharpened like a very sharp pencil and the other is like a sewing needle – as sharp as I can make it. A pair of reading glasses from the dollar store makes the work a lot easier as well. Any power like 2x up to 3.25x depending on how close you want to hold the flower and also on how close you can focus with your eyes. Twenty years ago I did crosses with tomatoes without glasses, but now I use them all the time. They are almost mandatory for working with beans.

My experience with Bicolor tomatoes is that crosses with yellow varieties are much easier to recover the Bicolor trait as Red is dominant and it seems difficult to get the Bicolor trait back in the offspring without planting an enormous amount of F2 seedlings to make it worth the effort. I’m not saying that it’s impossible, just more of a challenge.

The easiest tomatoes to cross for me have been the medium sized slicers. The very large beefsteak types sometimes have weird shaped flower parts that makes emasculating and pollination slightly harder. The very small cherry tomatoes usually have fused anthers all the way down to near the ovary so removing them is harder to do without accidentally breaking off the style and then you have to start over on another blossom. Most slicers have a little gap between the fused anthers down by the ovary and this allows me to carefully insert the sharpest side of the tweezer in between them and then pinch off that anther and then pull it up and off from the rest of the anthers. The second anther is easier because there is already a gap in the anther cone. By the time you get to the fourth anther I can sometimes grab all the others and gently twist and pull them from the flower and then the emasculating is complete. (The one thing at this point is to be careful not to rupture one of the anthers and contaminate your flower before you can cross it. Selecting closed flowers to work with usually avoids this problem. An open flower has usually already shed pollen so it’s too late with them.) After pollinating a small piece of masking tape over the flower will prevent any bumblebees from accidentally contaminating your cross. I mark the parentage on the flower immediately afterwards.

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