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 “Extra Large Red Promiscuous Tomato Project”. I planted quite a few. They are looking very promiscuous today.
Who’s 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 aren’t. 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 aren’t. 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 don’t 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 aloud…
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One advantage is that if you aren’t 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. I’ve been emasculating and using such flowers anyway.
I crossed Dwarf Gloria’s treat with a mix of pimpinillifolium pollen last year. Got about four Dwarf Gloria’s treat back from that deal! Also lots of crosses! So I am making new crosses with the four Dwarf Gloria’s 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.
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.
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?
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 Joseph’s 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.
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.
I’ve 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.
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!