I will use this thread to document my tomato growing. I am still early in the process so I am mostly exploring:
My criteria:
Large, open flowers that cross-pollinate
Robustness against sickness, esp. late blight
Flavor
Able to germinate direct sown (later)
My strategy
Start plants in cold benches in spring (in city) in trays - sown en masse to select for fast germination.
Make enough seed to direct sow tomatoes about 100 seed per target plant. I will experiment with @Joseph_Lofthouse’s great technique to blend with fast germinating radish, turnip and possibly large-leaved mustard greens.
Adding wild genetics from S. habrochaites, S. pimpinellifolium (assuming this is the ancestor for the domesticated type) as well as S. cheesmaniae - trusting @JesseI on the last one to not get fertility problems.
I will do a taste selection this week with chef students. I wonder if anyone has experience doing this with other people - perhaps @WilliamGrowsTomatoes or @Joseph_Lofthouse has some clues.
I don’t have multiple fruits from the same fruit this time. They’re all just bunched together more or less.
How to best taste the fruit and still save the seed?
The most flavorful part of the fruit I find is the gel around the seed. So we want to taste that. In private, I suck the gel and get a sense of the flavor and then spit out the rest including seed in a bowl to save the seed. In a public setting, I expect many people will not be willing to do that.
How do you distinguish between fruits that taste good because you eat them just at peak ripeness and fruits that are less good because they’re still unripe or overripe and getting mealy?
I did a mini taste test last year with a few colleagues. Might be a good thing to build up to, just do a small one, and then plan a larger one as you stabilize lines and grow more of them. This year’s grow out of mine isn’t super conducive to taste testing. Very heavy on F1’s I made in 2025.
There’s also the question of how much to let taste be a leading selector at this point. Might you not outselect plant that do have valuable contributions to make in the gene pool, because successful outdoor tomatoes in Denmark might need a few generations before they’re there?
(At some point I’d love to help you with this project when I have more soil prepared for growing, I’m based in Midtjylland)
My strategy is to apply a soft selection pressure on all the important criteria from the beginning. Those that have better flavor under field-grown conditions in Denmark right now makes sense to prioritize even more next generation. Also, I’m working with chefs and chef students. They’re all about flavor. Even if I grew a tomato that wasn’t very productive, but had delicious fruits, they would still be happy. So I treat it as high priority to select for from the beginning.
All the tomatoes that don’t make the cut get another chance by going into my direct sowing pool. All the tomatoes that are not terribly diseased can add potentially valuable genetics that way - if they are able to germinate after direct sowing!
Makes sense! I remember also seeing at Blue Hill at Stone Barns (super high end restaurant in the US) that they were breeding butternut squash to basically have the same amount of nutrients/flavor but condensed into a squash the size of a large pear.
Yes, good example. If your goal is flavor, then productivity becomes a measure of how much flavor you’re able to grow, not necessarily how many kg of the vegetable (which might just be water content). Blue Hill is one of the inspirations for the work we do - one of my colleagues did her internship there and many farm-to-table chefs know about the potentials in plant breeding from Dan Barber’s book the Third Plate.
Working with chefs really keep me grounded in reality. They give me instant feedback, even on things like tomatoes which everyone loves to some extend regardless of variety. They will say: “That’s boring” and don’t want to continue eating. If I give them a tomato I know has lots more flavor (but is super inbred), they instantly perk up and get happy. I can’t escape these regular reality checks and it keeps me focused on flavor.
