Some of my exserted tomatoes may have higher outcrossing rates than some of Joseph’s wild species crosses and some of Joseph’s wild species crosses may have higher outcrossing rates than some of my exserted tomatoes. This is complicated by the fact that I make liberal use of Joseph’s work and eventually it will probably all be merged in some lines. I see breeding for exsertion in tomatoes as a pre-breeding effort. So now if I want to I could create a population of tomatoes which only includes diverse exserted founders. I’m not sure that is strictly necessary though. What I am finding though is that it is really handy to have a exserted mother tomato with some recessive traits you can use as a visual marker. Potato leaves are one such trait and the rugose dwarfing trait is another.
I am an independent plant breeder like Joseph who works closely with Joseph and is heavily influenced by Joseph and by Carol Deppe. My prebreeding technique for exsertion of stigma in tomatoes is a different procedure but it is not incompatible with Joseph’s method writ large. I am prebreeding for a trait that leads to higher outcrossing rates!
One of my 2022 crossing blocks was between a particularly tasty selection of Joseph’s project and potato leaf exserted tomatoes. My hope is that it will lead eventually to a tastier tomato but with the potato leaves and blue skin of my line. I don’t know yet if the cross happened for sure and won’t until it is time to start seedlings. I’ll know then because any crosses will be regular leaf from a potato leaf mother!
Another cross I did make is between Joseph’s promiscuous and LA2329 habrochaites. In fact I’ve made the cross two years in a row now! I’ve also crossed the cross to my Mission Mountain Morning potato leaf exserted blue skinned bicolor F2 so yes I can finally say that I do indeed make crosses between my lines and Joseph’s promiscuous project. Though um I also made my own wild cross as part of that!
In my seed collection there are probably a number of wild crosses and crosses between partially wild parents and domestics between my and Joseph’s material. Only some of my gardens are isolation gardens and a lot of seed gets saved from the crossing block gardens. Every year I have one garden that is essentially a really messy crossing block. Exserted seed saved from that garden could have a lot of random fathers. It is hard to find those seedlings.
Just this year I realized that a lot of wild cross seedlings may actually be a bit weak at first as I successfully found them in my deliberate LA2329 crossing block domestic seeds. Joseph also found that he could sort seed lots for small sized seed and find habrochaites crosses that way. So if I applied both procedures to some of my seed packets we could probably search through and find a lot of fairly random habrochaites crosses as habrochaites has been in my messiest gardens with exserted strains since 2017. I think I would need help for that though! I don’t have the greenhouse space!
Most of the even shorter season than Stupice discoveries I made are not mine in the true sense. They are existing varieties like 42 days, Sweet Cherriette, Anmore Dewdrop, Coyote and Forest Fire. Though I wouldn’t be surprised if my Mission Mountain Sunrise is shorter season than Stupice. However, the shortest season variety I discovered Sweet Cherriette has now been crossed by me with Mission Mountain Morning my cross between my Mission Mountain Sunrise and Joseph’s Big Hill HX-9. So I am getting there in terms of developing my own early tomatoes!