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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