So regular tomatoes can’t contribute pollen to those obligate outcrossing tomato plants?
I’m also wondering if there is more info somewhere about this project, how those seeds came to be etc.
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Well I can tell you what I hope to accomplish with my own plot of them.
I hope to give over my west central garden to them. It’s 150 feet from other tomato gardens. That means I can grow pure solanum habrochaites in another garden without fear of contaminating Joseph’s obligate outcrossing tomatoes and setting them back a few years!
I hope to bag test flowers on a reasonable subset of them. If a bagged flower selfs- I might find it more convenient to rip out the whole plant after all than try to keep that plant separate and productive the rest of the growing season. I also know that bagging flowers is a lot of added work and that I likely won’t do as many as I’d like to!
I need to start them from transplant this year to give the other type of tomato I grew in that garden time to exhaust its seed bank a bit. So maybe it will be a more manageable population size. I’ll probably save lots of seeds and return them to GTS for 2026 seed share. Barring deer attacks and other acts of nature.
I also hope to gather some pollen from the patch if its good at producing pollen and see if I can make lots of crosses with it in other gardens. Can I use it as a father on Solanum habrochaites? How about on 50% Solanum habrochaites plants?
If I have extra plants of it. I might set up a few experiments in other gardens just to see what I can learn and create with this new type of tomato.
I consider myself to be breeding for open source, organic, and plastic free agriculture so I’ll avoid GMO and otherwise owned tomatoes, pesticides, and plastics.
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In theory yes, but biology can be messy and there are usually exceptions to any rule we try to make for plants. Which is one of the reasons I love these photosynthetic green rule breakers.
Joseph has written about these tomatoes quite a bit as he has worked towards their development over quite a few years now- longer than this forum has existed! More information may be available here, on permies.com, on the old Alan Bishop Proboards, on Facebook, and on the Open Source Seed Initiative plant breeding forum and possibly other places. I can’t remember what he said about it in the final version of his book but I think he touched on the project there as well.
The basic story is that Joseph has been working with Solanum habrochaites and Solanum penellii for the better part of a decade at least to develop new tomatoes and since these wild tomato species are self incompatible like tomatillos and hybrid tomatoes really do seem like a good deal for short season gardeners- the possibility of breeding the traits necessary into domestic tomatoes arose as something that might be very useful.
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Sounds good!
Ya I’ve read about this project of Joseph’s before, I was just curious if there was a breakthrough/result where he decided it was time to share with the community.
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He did decide to share this version with us!
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Hi, I made many crosses last year between Big Hill, Exserted orange and all my outdoor tomatoes. I have a simple question : for each of these two types (big hill and exserted orange), does anyone know if the “exserted stigma” strain is dominant or recessive ? This year I will be in F1 and if they are dominant, I can make directly backcrosses with tomatoes of my farm. If not, I will need to let selfing this year and wait for the progeny in 2026 to make backcrosses.
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My understanding is that exsertion is at best recessive, but more likely the result of the right combination of multiple genes or modifiers.
Some make longer or shorter stigma. Some make longer or shorter anther cone. Some make thin dainty stigma. Some make sturdy broad stigma. Some make a better pollen producer but a worse mother. Some make a better mother but a worse pollen producer.
What we look for is the golden egg! The juuuust right bowl of porridge! 
The lucky ones where the right combination of genes line up together in the same plant.
I’m sure others will have better explanation but that’s my current understanding. I think I asked similarly on the OSSI forum but it’d take a bit to find it. Probably on the Promiscuous and tasty tomato thread if I had to guess. Or a thread talking specifically about exsertion if not.
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To make my F2 selection of the Big Hill x Unknown orange cross that I called Exserted Orange I found only one plant with stigmas that stuck out extremely far. I did something quite similar with Exserted Tiger in the F2. I never shared Mission Mountain Morning but I did the same thing again- crossing Mission Mountain Sunrise X Big Hill and selecting in the F2 for best exsertion. However, some other strains and crosses have been harder to select for the trait if I recall I’ve had a few failures with some of the wild crosses not being very exserted the second year. The trait seems to come in degrees though and has, at least in some strains, some environmental stimuluses that result in greater exsertion of the stigma. For instance several times I’ve noticed exsertion in plants sitting in trays of water at stores. Warmer weather is supposed to make for greater exsertion.
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Perhaps exsertion from genetics and exsertion from environmental stress are two different things?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/pce.13444
" Here, we demonstrate that stigma exsertion induced by High Temperature in cultivated tomato is caused by more seriously shortened stamens than pistils, which is different from the stigma exsertion observed in wild tomato species."
This may imply that we need to be careful when selecting for exsertion because it might be environment-dependent in some cases.
Also I find it interesting that tomatoes would lean towards cross-pollinating if they are struggling in their environment. Sounds like an adaptation mechanism to me.
IMO, the ability to increase cross-pollination under stress may have been naturally selected as a beneficial trait in fluctuating environments
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I agree