Thanks. A few inches ~ 10 feet, that’s a huge variation! Why such variation?
So far I put my wilds something like 10 inches apart, and my domestics about 11.5~2 feet apart with rows about 2~3 feet apart. Something like that, I didn’t measure and I’m not there right now. Haven’t staked any wilds but have staked most of the domestics with one piece of (thin) bamboo each (it gets a fair amount of wind there, and there being a lot of blight here, some of the domestics would likely do quite badly if left to ‘walk’ around). Sound ok? I don’t have much space so have only got around 35 in the ground so far though will be putting in something like at least 10 more. The soil is so low in organic matter, which is sad, but it’s all I have outside right now. Keeping the ones inside that I’ve been crossing while too early to plant outside, to give their fruits the best chance of giving seeds. And keeping some more young ones indoors too, in small pots and small hydro, to a) give flowers quicker for crossing, and b) some of them as backup in case outside goes badly.
Wish I had a greenhouse, seems silly in a way to be using LED lights while it’s so sunny outside! But here I don’t have, so, seems the best choice I have if I don’t want to put all my eggs in the basket of my outdoor plot.
If I have just say one volunteer in an area it might get a huge space. If I had one really special plant I might give it extra space. If I want to isolate a plant a little more space. If I want plants to cross natutally I plant them as close as possible. Direct seeding I usually over plant a bit. It leads to quite a bit of spacing differences. It is possible to plant too thickly but it takes an enormous amount of seed and a seeding pattern that is wide without row space. I’ve also varied it over time as I have gardened on and off for decades. Followed square foot gardening reccommendations or how to grow more vegetables, seed packet reccommendations and so forth. Also I often lazily plant whole clumps of seedlings as I usually plant about four seeds in a pot of each variety. So my Bison seedling this year is a clump of four. As is my Uluru Ochre. My focus now is breeding and occasionally seed production. With seed production I take more care and may increase soacing especially if it is a contract.
Not much disease here. I can’t speak to methods for such a different climate. Sounds fine to me though! Tomatoes can handle a lot of variation based on my experiments.
So I just came across more info on potato leaves. It’s intermingled with exserted stigma info, both of which are of interest to us folk so I’ve made a new post on it, to make it more accessible rather than being buried in this topic:
How many F2 plants of a regular cross would be commonly considered reasonable to grow out? Like, as a kind of reasonable minimum? I was thinking 20 could be a good number to grow out but with say 20 crosses, 400 becomes a lot! I was just watching a video by Craig LeHoullier and at 28:00 he’s saying he “grew out maybe 8 F2s” - that would be way more manageable! Though I’d worry if it might be too few. Would love to hear from others on this!
Oh and I guess for stable X unstable (e.g. stable domestic X wild non-stable cross; or stable domestic X F1 domestic) maybe it’s worth growing a few rather than just 1 (any ideas on that? Like 4?) and then the larger growout at F2 for those? And then straight to the larger growout at F1 for unstable X unstable, for example domestic F1 X unstable wild (e.g. SI wild). Sound right?
How many F2 plants to grow could depend on how different the cross parents were and how many traits you want to recover from the cross! So the answer could be one or it could be several thousand! Craig doesn’t like doing crosses of crosses for instance- with crosses of crosses you would need a larger F2 if you wanted to recover something specific eight would not cut it, but 2000 might.
Is there any number between 8 and 2,000 you’d recommend?
Just thinking aloud here but, I guess my strategy might be…
Main project:
For each cross growout, from the survivors (which is already selecting for suitability to conditions) select like… maybe 3 that are acceptable enough in terms of:
stigma exsertion
earliness
fruit size
Then cross those 3 with the same criteria 3-group of each other cross (maybe using mixed pollen technique since if dealing with 20 original crosses, that would be 60 plants all wanting crossing with each other so there wouldn’t even be enough flowers per plant to do it manually!), and from that point on, landrace them as a single population? How does that sound? And I’m thinking maybe select for taste of fruits after switching to landrace method, just so don’t have to select for too many phenotypes at once.
If that sounds good, how many would you grow for each cross to aim to getting those 3?
Could also be cool to do some other projects such as
Spider mite project:
Grow out an F2 population in a greenhouse deliberately populated with spider mites. Perhaps that could be done when the plants are still young, so that more plants could fit in and be selected before taking up too much room?
Late blight project:
Is it possible to keep late blight in a jar or something? Like, at the end of this year’s season, get infected leaves and somehow keep the late blight alive, and introduce it later to a bunch of F2 seedlings for selection?
Drought tolerance:
The chances of me being able to cross with chilense are minimal, but if I do, I wonder if the F2 could be selected at a young age? I would guess not too young, but I wonder how tall or old the plants should get before being tested by stopping watering - any ideas? Testing at some kind of minimum age could as above mean being able to grow out a larger population in a smaller space.
Number depends on how many traits you want plus how much space you have. Sounds like you want earliness, exserted stigma and size. I would say I get one really nice stigma back from 200 F2s. So add size and earliness… maybe 600? How much space do you have- got 600 square feet you can crowd them into? Though you can get to the same place by crossing full or half siblings or by back crossing to a favorite parent with far fewer plants.
Oh damn! Are you saying that for example if one parent has a nicely exserted stigma, there’s only a 1 in 200 chance that the offspring will have it? That sounds counterintuitive to me. I was thinking even if it’s recessive, it might be 25%… is the chance really so low?
And crossing a beefsteak with an exserted wild, I thought the changes would be even higher…
Right now yeah I have more than 600 square feet. What spacing would you recommend for ‘crowded’ - 1.75 feet spacing? I’ve been digging for hours, my brain is hurting too much to do the maths on that and be sure…
Yes it isn’t a simple trait it is a gradient of lengths. Can’t think of the word. I want the most extreme form I can get and I would peg the chances at about 1 in 200 of getting an really good one. I get lots that are just a bit exserted. I believe that the better exsertion comes with higher outcrossing rates from observations so far.
Though one caveat. I think their are potentially multiple different forms of the trait and they may not all behave or segregate in the same way. I’m slowly crossing different exserted strains to see what happens.
Yeah at the center of each square foot plant a tomato plant. 12 inches apart. However, that spacing probably won’t work with the late blight issues.
Oh sorry I just realised you were saying 600 plants in 600 square feet, not 200 plants. Wow that’s dense! I’ll bear that in mind!
I’d love to hear about that as that progresses!
Yeah good point. I guess unless it’s also a severe late blight test! Actually I should have put that as one of the main criteria, it is really important. Perhaps I could grow that way for crosses that are likely to be good against late blight, and less crowded for others that aren’t but the successful resultant candidates I will later want to cross into the late blight resistant lines. Probably foolish to do such a late blight competition on all crosses at once.
By the way something Joseph wrote on Facebook this week just made me realise I had either been misunderstanding his SI project all this time, or I had understood before but somehow forgotten. I’d been thinking his SI edible tomatoes simply can’t self, but can receive pollen from other edibles such as his SC wildings or Q4 or heirlooms. Can they? Such as the SI elites?
Either way, I understand now that Joseph’s aim is to create an or multiple SI lines that cannot. And that makes a whole lot of sense to me. And that seems to have an advantage over the usual traditional landrace idea of having a low but significant rate of crossing - in that way, exsertion would seem essential, and with an established landrace, the low but significant rate of natural crossing would seem the good balance between genetic variation enough to continue to adapt and stay healthy, whilst still maintaining a relatively steady phenotype. But, in normal situations, such an exserted SC population would be bound to tend towards insertion due to most of us being surrounded by others growing inserted tomatoes, which would over time dilute our exsertion.
So, having an SI population incompatible with inserted neighbours, would seem the appropriate way to protect the population from genetically depressed and inserted neighbours, just as SI wild populations are protected from other species which may be growing right next to them. So that attracts me more to SI now. It seems more sustainable in the long run. How do you feel about that William?
I think it is a nice idea. It is a long slog working with Solanum habrochaites and other hard green extremely unpalatable species though. I’m doing it, but it is a long road. Might be a good idea to make a few easier crosses with Solanum cheesemanii and Solanumpimpinillifolium as well to plan for some faster results.
Are you saying hab is easier to cross to che and pimp than to lyc? Funnily enough I have been trying to cross acr and per to pimp, thinking that the shorter style might make it easier than to lyc. I have some hab but none flowered yet and have not been too interested in crossing with it, partly because of the long green journey and also partly because of not being so interested in SI, until now. And then also because I have various varieties with hab genetics that are already good tasting, so figured didn’t need them. But, I do have a relatively early hab (reportedly) that I’m growing a few plants of. Not sure on its disease resistance. Only have 4 or 5 of them growing so wouldn’t be enough I guess to start making a good enough SI system with crossing (or would it?) but maybe I’ll see how it does along with my other habs and depending on what does well here, maybe think about that for next cycle.
No I am saying cross the easier species with domestic too! That way you’ll have some fun easy crosses to enjoy during the years before the hab x domestic also become fun! Though their are multiple kinds of fun. I am fairly tired this week. Some long surveys for work and a very long office day.
Justin asked about my slow crossing of exserted x exserted from multiple sources.
I crossed Exserted Tiger x Exserted Orange finally last weekend and I think the cross took and the Tomato is enlarging. ET got its exsertion from Blue Ambrosia which may have gotten it from Sungold F1. EO gets its from Big Hill presumably.
In 2021 I crossed Mission Mountain Sunrise x Big Hill where MMS gets its exsertion from an unknown Lofthouse potato leaf. MMS does not have stable exsertion it seems environmental and it is variable. So of course one of the first blooming Mission Mountain Morning F3 from the best exsertion 2022 F2 of this cross is not as much exserted.
I’ve also crossed promiscuous x LA2329 a habrochaites strain and MMM x that.
I have a few other original exserted strains to cross in as well. I’m kind of curious to see how the trait(s) segregate out.
Ah, I see. Yeah for sure. My grow room is full of hanging crossing tags, been trying many many crosses. I’ll call domestics and domestic/wild crosses all ‘edible’ for convenience, and I won’t be specific about direction of cross:
edible - edible
edible - chm
edible - per
edible - arc
edible - pen
edible - che
edible - gal
edible - pimp
pimp - pimp
pimp - chm
pimp - per
pimp - arc
pimp - pen
per - per
gal - chm
Off the top of my head, those are the crosses I’ve been trying so far though I think there are more. Many crossed fruits ripening now, and many more crosses to do as more plants flower. And some of those crosses I’ve done with multiple accessions, and some of the crosses I will continue to do more of, for example I have many crosses with peruvianum but I’d be sad if none end up having fertile seeds, so figure I should make many crosses to increase the chances of having viable seed to work with next cycle.
Some crosses actually have ripe looking fruits already. I’m not really sure when to pick them though. I had a couple of tomatoes that were not crosses that I thought by colour were totally ripe, but inside the seed stuff was green and seeds not ready at all. Tasted good but seems I should have waited longer. (Others have been ripe with well formed seeds so it’s not all of them). So for the crosses, I’ll wait longer. Any tips on that?
Here’s a photo of a taste test I did the other day on some non-crossed fruit. All interspecies hybrids.
Top two have hab and pen; next has hab; next has che and pimp; last was (looked totally ripe but wasn’t quite ready actually, usually these are sweeter but same colour) told to me as having hab but I wonder if it may also have chm in it. It was a delicious taste test!
Sounds fun! I have been making crosses this weekend and last weekend. Crosses of crosses though are kind of a curiosity. Should I keep on crossing, or should I stabilize for awhile? I’ve made a few, but I could make quite a few such combinations with last years crosses.
