I can’t help but to grow more seeds but they shall likely be weirder and wilder than that. There will likely be a garden with MMM crosses including MMM x Aztek, MMM x Dwarf Rugose Pimp, MMM x LB PH5 Pimp, MMM x Sweet Cherriette, MMM x Brad’s Atomic Grape, MMM x Purple Zebra F1, and Dwarf Gloria’s Treat x mixed pimps. There will likely be some crossing between rows. I shall likely save seed from each of those crosses but also perhaps seed from all of those crosses in a glorious mixed up F2/F3. There will also be a separate garden where we might find MMM x LA2329 and MMM x LA1410 crosses - though I need answers on basic questions like does the TGRC MTA apply to derivatives? (Edit it does not!) for that garden. Then there will be new crossing blocks to cross ET, EO and others back into the Montana Tomato project.
Absolutely wonderful. And very inspiring! Thank you for your efforts and your willingness and being a fellow plant/seed ‘addict’ 
Really looking forward to seeing what you grow.
Wandering back over here to look for flavour info and thinking I wish a couple of us were set up to calculate our degree days or whatnot, and could trial a couple simultaneously and count days, degree days, etc to see how close we got.
Interesting. I was just thinking since 2 days ago about trying to create a hybrid swarm of the earliest pimp accessions and then landrace them.
Come to think of it, aside from Joseph with his S. peruvianum (is that actually maybe a mix of multiple perivianum complex species, not just S. peruvianum?) and Neandermato (habrochaites) landraces, is anyone even landracing any of the wild species? It would make some sense to me to pick a species, work out what traits are desirable in it, gather as many useful accessions as possible, then landrace them to try get get all the best out of them as well as adapting them as much as possible to the local environment, and then use them as breeding partners. I guess it’s a lot of extra time.
I wonder if we could find that info somehow by looking at weather databases. It has been very interesting to me to grow Joseph’s tomatoes (not just tomatoes but most crops) which are at a lower latitude but shorter season than mine. They do surprisingly well here.
I would discourage this a bit except with commercially available accessions. This is why: It has been said something to the effect that a single accession of some of the hard green fruited obligate outcrossing accessions of tomato (Self Incompatible or SI) contain more genetic diversity than all domestic tomatoes combined.
Pause and let that sink in for a bit.
Then consider this. If you cross two of those accessions together, this is what will happen. The genetic diversity of the two accessions will at first double, and then as you go down through the generations slowly decrease to about the same amount as just one accession. This loss of genetic diversity will be greater than if you had kept the two accessions of wild tomato separate.
With pimpinillifolium we can think of one accession as being a lot more like one variety. Still over many accessions pimpinnilifolium has greater diversity than does domesticated tomato but it isn’t visual diversity like we find in domestic tomatoes, it’s at the genetic level.
So still, I think this would be best practice. Keep your wild accessions separate.
Then cross them into your domestic tomato projects to add the genetic diversity that domestic tomatoes lack.
If you do create a wild accession hybrid swarm or grex, consider also additionally keeping accessions separate as tomato seed lives a long time and you only need to grow it out occasionally isolated. Otherwise, I fear that many future amateur breeders may not have good access to wild tomato genetics.
So for me that means sharing seed of the four wild tomato accessions I crossed with last year and sharing seed with the four wild x domesticated crosses as at least somewhat separate entities.
There are limits to time and energy though so if you have quite a few wild tomato accessions some crossing may be a bit inevitable.
@WilliamGrowsTomatoes I did not know that tomato seeds live a long time, or I might have sent you a lot more seeds and closer generation wise, to when I found the first crossed up pimpinillifolium. Instead, you got decedents of those, five or six generations down the line. And descendants of some that came in the middle of winter from a greenhouse in Canada. I wonder if some of those might actually be bred from wild types, to be so sweet grown like that.
Anyway, do you want some of those older seeds so as to be sure of having the actual pimpinillifolium crosses? Some of them I think might be the F1 but I don’t know for sure, they were surprise volunteers.
Ok, I will try. But first I need to understand what it means. For example, I read such statements as:
Humans and chimps share 98.8% of their DNA
and from the Pfizer website (sorry I hate that company but it happened to be the first google hit) that humans and bananas share 60% of our DNA. So I have never quite understood what statements like the one you made, are talking about. For example, does it mean, let’s say that suppose all domestic tomatoes share 99.999% of their DNA, but one single accession (presumably of good enough population size) of a SI wild tomato might only have 99.9986% in common among all individuals? If this is the case, then I have understood it.
But will it? If I may hypothesise for a moment - suppose we label them accession A and accession B. Suppose we label the diversity element, ‘d’. Perhaps that ‘d’ represents those genes which have different options in the population, so we could use ‘d’ as a measure of diverisity. So supposing we quantify it as ‘dA’ (diversity within A) is… let’s say 10, just to give a round number.
Now let’s say in population B, also dB=10.
But now let’s hypothesise that those options of genes are not all different from A to B. To give a human example, French people could have blue or brown eyes, and so also can Irish people. It’s not that Irish people can only have orange or purple eyes! So when you mix Irish and French people, although they both had d=2 in this respect, you don’t get d=4 as a result, you still have d=2. So, just hypothetically, might you not have something like:
dA=10
dB=10
dA+dB=12
Because, just to give a hypothetical example, d8 is common between both populations, only 4 is unique to one or the other.
I am saying this purely on the basis of speculation. But I did read for example that S. chilense is SI, and yet “is remarkably uniform morpologically”, which at least to my ignorant mind, seems to possibly affirm my logic.
You will lose more because you started with more but you will end up with the same amount, in your example. However, instead of having x amount of random diversity, you may have selected for the traits you want. And that’s my point. Suppose you have 5 accessions of S. peruvianum, each with specific traits you really like. You’re not going to get most of their ‘diversity’ into a domesticated line anyway, and you wouldn’t want to, otherwise it wouldn’t be domesticated at all. But it should be possible to breed the accessions together such that you end up with 1 population that finally has all of those traits you wanted from the original 5 accessions. And in the process you might have also increased its earliness, and made it sweeter too. So, ok suppose you now have only the diversity level of one single SI accession, but that’s actually fantastic, because you now have a very high concentration of those 5 traits, making it way easier to cross them all at once (or anyway quicker) into a domestic line. You’ve massively increased the ‘signal:noise’ ratio, so to speak. Unless there is something I am not understanding?
I mean, diversity is nice. But in reality we actually specifically don’t want a lot of it, right? We have to work to breed much of it out - the ‘bad’ tastes and all the other traits we judge as ‘bad’, as well as all the diversity that leads it to be selected out by the conditions we expose it to. And we specifically want other aspects - big flowers, arthropod resistance, etc. This is what I mean by signal:noise.
Yeah that sounds like a good idea to me and as it happens I had already planned to do this 
Yeah, they live about 14 years! Maybe!
You are on the right track they make comparisons sometimes basically from a zoomed-out perspective vs. a zoomed in perspective when comparing genomic diversity- it is annoying because they never fully explain and then no one goes back and explains all the prior errant quotes based on some other comparison from years ago. Still incredibly important because it is that genetic level diversity that matters to food security with crops and the survival of species with biodiversity.
Genetic drift is the key concept.
Yeah, morphologically wild species are often very similar but have huge differences at the genetic level. The reverse is true for domesticated tomatoes, huge morphological differences from a very narrow genetic base. It creates a sort of false equivalency- I have to continuously remind myself that my wild tomato seed packets are more important than my domestic packets in my collection.
Mainly I am just saying that as a group it’s important to also save these wild accessions and share them with others like us. Not for us personally -though also perhaps for our future selves because periodically articles get published that have interesting tidbits about specific accessions and ten years from now you might want that accession back! Not many people want to grow ridiculously tiny tomatoes many of the species of which are to put it kindly revoltingly unpalatable and an extremely long slow haul for breeding. So we are kind of it when it comes to preserving these wild accessions.
Thanks William. By the way, for SI species, for seed saving, how many individuals would you say we should plant, minimum? Sorry if you have told this already, I’m so tired and I feel like you might have, but if my brain is right I think it’s the TGRC figure I was reading that’s making me feel that. Their figure is high and must be very good, but I wonder, as individual people, what would you say we should be doing as a minimum, so we can give them on? Also I worry about sources such as HRSeeds, I wonder how many individuals someone like him might be producing seeds from? Some of his seeds gave such poor germination rates, appearing to have been crushed (unless that happened in post) and his species identification was faulty on multiple items he sells, so, I wonder about other things, such as population size. If we do act as keepers of seeds like you say, then I guess we should try to not become too much of a bottleneck, like only growing 2 individuals of an SI species would I would guess be a rather bad idea?
https://tgrc.ucdavis.edu/spprecommed.aspx
Yeah TGRC recommendations are the best we have in the table in the above link.
HRseeds is a commercial source and there are few.
Ultimately we are humans and since none of us here are professional tomato breeders this is extra work for us to take on. So just do what you can and hopefully find some likeminded folks to share what you can with them.
Yeah that’s what I was reading yesterday. Though not sure all of us could realistically have populations of ‘50~75’ for each accession. But it does say:
Population sizes used by the TGRC for seed multiplication are intended to maintain genetic diversity long term; smaller populations are sufficient for seed production.
which is what provoked my enquiry.
I’m kind of hoping that 10 might be enough temporarily at least
Another thing on that TGRC chart is their recommendation for 3~5 plants per 1 gallon pot, depending on the species. And they correct that in a footnote by saying the ‘1 gallon’ pots are 3qt, not 1 gallon. That’s 3.5 litres. I was surprised that 3 or 5 plants can do fine for their whole lives in such small pots, but it must be right. I just wanted maybe some reassurance - that’s truly good? (Great for me if it is!)
And, when’s a good time to move them to their 3 qt homes? I have some in 9cm high (3.5 inch) 8cm wide (3.15 inch) pots, and some in even smaller pots or cells. Wondering how tall to let them get in the former before transferring them, and also for the really small cells, whether to transfer them individually to the 9x8cm pots and then the 3 qt homes, or, just direct to 3 qt communal homes?
It’s interesting! You also don’t need to grow all 50 to 75 the same year necessarily. As long as you grow them and then use seed from multiple years to do the next growout. Also look how many plants you can fit in a relatively small pot.
Ah, clever!
Yeah, that really surprised me! So much I wasn’t sure if I was interpreting it right! But still, I really have to limit things this time at least since they are literally living with me in a small room, and I have many different things to grow Also William sorry as you were replying I edited my above comment to additionally ask about when to transfer them… sorry to trouble you, hope you don’t mind these questions!
You can transplant them to their final 3 quart homes as soon as they seem ready for transplant just like a domestic. I start them a few weeks earlier than domestics to give them a little more time with my short growing season.
Yep that is what they do at TGRC, grow them their whole lives in a relatively small pot. I wanted to do this a few years ago, then field season hit, my wife went to visit family, and I planted all the plants in the ground so that roots could find their own moisture during the week. It didn’t work as well as I would have liked but I did grow seed with lots of potential pollen donors. I suspect my LA2329 population has undergone some genetic drift because these accessions are a bit difficult to reproduce in a short growing season. TGRC is at UC Davis in the California central valley. Much longer growing season.
How tall is that? I’ve only ever direct seeded domestics. Also these will live their life to seed probably all indoors.
I think the smaller pots might help them be fast. I think it pressures them to flower earlier. At least this seems the case from the speed breeding for soybeans and some other crops - I have yet to study papers on tomato speed breeding…
It isn’t the height but the root development that lets you know when to transplant! There is a term called “root tight” before root bound when the soil ball moves easily. That is the ideal. Usually though the height is proportional to the root development so you can kind of judge that if the above ground plant volume looks about as big as the pot that the roots must be getting close to filling that space.
Indoors get etiolated if the light isn’t strong enough, can take some space like that.
Yes I suspect that hitting that barrier of soil volume gets the plants to reproduce earlier.
In my garden I have 7" of topsoil on average and beneath that a 7" clay accumulation layer. I also do not provide support for the vines. So the plants hit the clay accumulation layer with their roots and the limits of support with their shoots and they reproduce instead of growing more. This actually helps them in my short season to successfully reproduce both domestic and wild.