Yeah I wonder if that means the few plants injad space for this year will be some ridiculously cool cross with ancestral genetics!
They still fold up the baby leaves, now around the first true leaves
Oh cool! Thanks for your reply!
Love your conclusion on why they might do that, makes perfect sense!
Haha, I was tempted to grow another random heirloom, just to double check if perhaps all tomatoes do that and I had just missed it in the past!
I am super excited to see what these turn into, fruit and plant wise!
Somehow I aquired a packet of âExtra Large Red Promiscuous Tomato Projectâ. I planted quite a few. They are looking very promiscuous today.
Whoâs seeing Promiscuous flowers?
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I am seeing exserted flowers. I am also seeing flowers that are not! Also the full range in between. What is interesting is always that some that I may have been not expecting to be exserted are, and some that I was expecting to be exserted arenât. Regardless I have been ripping them open and crossing them every which way. I also finally made the cross of Exserted Tiger x Exserted Orange. Though am also making lots of crosses with F1 and F2 tomatoes with ancestry from exserted flowers that have not had time to segregate!
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A lot of my tomatoes seem to have very open flowers at the beginning of the season, but the later flowers arenât. This year it is continuing to happen, I guess maybe because of the oddly cool weather. A lot of the really open ones are double, with more than one stigma. I donât remember the name for that and although it is fairly common it usually is just the very first few flowers.
@WilliamGrowsTomatoes Is there any advantage, or disadvantage to using those flowers in attempted crossing?
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I wonder if this is left over from old SI tomatoes? I could imagine an adaptive advantage of having flowers that are attractive from a greater distance at the beginning of the flowering time, in order to be pollinated by other individuals that might be far away, but maybe not needing to spend so much energy on that once more nearby individuals are flowering. Just thinking aloudâŚ
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One advantage is that if you arenât emasculating they are open so it would be easy to daub some pollen on there.
Another advantage is that these flowers are big and can set a lot of seed.
One disadvantage is that they can be quite messy with anthers sort of mixed in to and sometimes quite fused with the giant fused stigmas. That can make it difficult to completely emasculate them if emasculation is desired. Iâve been emasculating and using such flowers anyway.
I crossed Dwarf Gloriaâs treat with a mix of pimpinillifolium pollen last year. Got about four Dwarf Gloriaâs treat back from that deal! Also lots of crosses! So I am making new crosses with the four Dwarf Gloriaâs treat plants. Since it is a dwarf potato leaf I can tell any crossed and uncrossed seedlings easily in two ways. Regular leaf is dominant and non-dwarf is dominant. So there are seedling tells.
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The tomatoes in the foreground are from the GTS promiscuous mix. Some of them are starting to form green fruits. I look forward to trying them and saving seed from the good ones.
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So last weekend I tried a manual cross both ways with volunteers in what was the 2022 crossing block for a hoped for MMM or MMS x The One!. It looks like a The One x Mission Mountain cross has taken for sure. Assuming nothing eats it and I manage to harvest the ripe seed- that could be one possible end to this saga!
Though there is another possibility- I may yet find a regular leaf tomato plant with a bit of blue on the fruit! The expected cross from 2022- might still be out there in the garden.
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I planted 5 The Ones in the field, and one in a little greenhouse so I could be sure I would at least get to try a tomato from it. The plant is big and apparently healthy but the flowers keep falling off when others around are making green tomatoes. I never heard you mention self incompatibility, but is that possible? Or maybe just nights are too cold?
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I am not sure. I think we selected for plants that seemed like they might be self incompatible by dropping early flowers. I have had difficulty finding pollen- that stopped some of my attempted crosses last year. Though last weekend I found pollen easily. I also have a 2023 grow report of someone else finding pollen easily in The One! This year. Self incompatibility is a possibility though. One way to check a potentially self incompatible plant is to try pollinating it with domestic pollen from another tomato plant and pure habrochaites pollen on different flowers and see what happens.
I have a half baked thought that a proper future test of Josephâs long awaited self incompatible tomatoes might be to try pollinating them with the several different accessions of Solanum habrochaites I have accumulated over the years and domestics. Maybe even four or more isolation blocks!
It is very possible that some of the sub populations of Josephs promiscuous tomato project could have mixed breeding systems where some plants are SI but some are SC. This is actually true in some wild accessions of the SI species. It could be true in The One but would seem unlikely as all came from one 2021 mother plant. Though there is variability within the population which could indicate outcrossing or ongoing segregation or both.
My crossing attempt of a week ago, which seems to have accepted SC domestic pollen, would suggest SC in the plant I attempted it on.
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My The One x MM cross is still quite green as of last night. I have however picked a little baggie of not blue MM fruit from the never watered volunteer Mission Mountain potato leaf plants. I suspect they are MMM not MMS as MMS has had longer to segregate for blue it is F6 this year and will be F7 next year. MMM is only F3.
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Iâve started a 72 cell tray with a mixture of GTS 2024 promiscuous with other like varieties I got from EFN. Thank you William for being obsessed with this. I see value in the project and hopefully will have some level of success in the Deep South.
I planted some of these varieties in the late spring to early summer last year. They failed but so did all the other tomatoes as well. Actually it looked like Punta Banda was going to produce something but it started to flower at the worst possible time in 95 plus temps.
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How lucky I feel to have found this thread in my search for varieties to cross with the Everglades cherry! I have quite a lot more reading to do before I can even contribute any posts of value, but I wanted to express my gratitude. The information and genetic material you have made so easily available is invaluable!
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I am currently sprouting a few seeds of four tomato breeding lines to combat the winter doldrums. One of them is my favorite 2024 descendant of the tasty line I have been trying (so far unsuccessfully) to stabilize of Josephâs promiscuous project. Well, the mother appeared to be a rugose dwarf with potato leaves. Edit: I was looking in the wrong pot. They seem to be pretty stable for both seedling height and potato leaf. Which is good in terms of stabilizing a line. It is also strong evidence that the seed saved from this particular mother plant doesnât have a very high outcrossing rate- it will be interesting to grow more seed out later to see what the outcrossing rate is.
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For obligate outcrossing tomatoes that were offered by GTS this year, should we try to let them cross within themselves? Will some of the descendants be obligate ourcrossing if they cross with regular or promiscious tomatoes? I am wondering what your purposes are when providing those precious seeds to the community.
I think everyone will do what they want, but in terms of the intent of this seed share: should we use them as tools to induce more crosses, or should we try to keep some purity in terms of obligatory outcrossing genetics?
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If the obligate outcrossing tomatoes are as I think we hope they are, they should be more than merely promiscuous and interact with other tomatoes as pollen parents only just like the Solanum habrochaites and Solanum penellii do. So, itâs possible that their traits would spread to other tomatoes- but other tomatoes shouldnât affect them. Just to be on the safe side I still wouldnât grow the GMO purple snapdragon gene tomatoes though as those arenât suitable for organic certification and might have legal implications in the future for folks on a seed share.
You almost have to let them cross within themselves as they need more than one plant. If they contribute pollen to regular or non-obligate tomatoes with an elongated style some portion of the offspring may pick up the obligate trait. If you grow them next to some of Josephâs other promiscuous offerings which might have mixed breeding systems they may cross with the obligate individuals. If you grow obligate outcrossing Solanum habrochaites or Solanum penellii they may provide pollen to the obligate outcrossing lines and produce F1 hybrids that are unpalatable.
My hope as the tomato steward is that folks will choose to save and return seed for them! If you plant the obligate outcrossing tomatoes in a way that allows you to save seed from them as mothers it would be great if you could share it back to the seed share so that others can try them next year.
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William, I think what Patate was hinting at, and what I have been thinking about as well is: âIf we want to contribute to the GTS obligate outcrossing mix for 2026, what protocol should we follow in 2025, as a minimum, for these seeds to improve the mix, instead of being diluted by non-obligate outcrossing children.â
Examples:
-
a) plant the GTS obligate outcrossing mix by itself, at least 150 feet from any other tomato plants
b) Put organza fruit bags around early flowers, when flowers are âripeâ, vibrate them in their organza bags to induce self-pollination, if they donât produce fruit, you have a self-incompatible plant, if it produces fruit, cull it.
c) Once all self-incompatible plants are identified and others are culled, only keep fruits from flowers pollinated after all the culls, to avoid pollen from culled plants to have pollinated flowers. -
a) plant the GTS obligate outcrossing mix with the orange exserted mix, at least 150 feet from any other tomato plants
b) keep seeds of all tomatoes/plants
The question is: could (2) be added to the GTS obligate outcrossing mix or rejected as not âpureâ enough.
Maarten
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You should not need to protect obligate outcrossing tomato plants from other tomatoes. Though the reverse may be true for other tomatoes with elongated styles or exserted stigmas if you dont want them crossed.
Using organza bags to test for selfing might be useful in case the trait or traits for self incompatibility are still segregating. Though false positives might still be possible based on my Initial foray into organza bags in 2024. So more than one bagging per plant might be helpful for best data. Though I see no reason to require this level of effort of everyone. If a plant did fail the test you wouldnât need to cull it- just not save its seeds as self incompatible.
Exserted Orange is in my opinion a full domestic with a mechanical mechanism for a slightly higher crossing rate. It could recieve pollen From obligate outcrossing tomatoes but it wouldnât contribute pollen. I would not want seed from it for the seed share, bit if you did cross it deliberately with the obligate outcrossing tomatoes I would accept seed from those crosses in the F2 and beyond but it would go into the general promiscuous pool until and unless someone did the careful work of selecting the resulting offspring over generations for obligate outcrossing.
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"You should not need to protect obligate outcrossing tomato plants from other tomatoes. "
Definitely, but if we were to, would they be accepted in the obligate outcrossing mix?
This is what was added to the description of the GTS obligate outcrossing mix: "These tomatoes are quite rare, and we greatly appreciate grow reports and seed returns of these genetics. "
So, if the goal is to get seed returns as the seeds are rare, Iâd like to understand what the growing/selection conditions are to send seeds back AND get them accepted in the obligate outcrossing mix. Iâd like to avoid adding some work to my tomato growing, for them just to be added to the promiscuous mix like my other tomatoes.
Maarten
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