Is there any interest for a cherry tomato grex? Or splitting the tomato group into Slicers / Sauces / Cherries, Steward Schlegel?
Solanum pimpinellifolium accepts pollen from the wild tomatoes and from the panamorous tomatoes. I made that cross two years ago. It produces great offspring.
The everglades tomato would also accept pollen from the wild and panamorous tomatoes.
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Thanks, sounds like you’re already 100 steps ahead. Glad you started this project, it’s the most important one I know of, and it’s cool.
I have a bit of a limited capacity due to some commitments I made to EFN which may include some awesome cherry sized tomato crosses. I may make a sauce tomato cross this year with a Montana heirloom. Do I hear the sweet sound of volunteering?
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I made two pimpinillifolium crosses last year and a cross with a galapagense hybrid. Growing the seedlings now.
I’m not sure what I’m volunteering for, but I’m willing to help where I can! 
I have most of my tomatoes in the ground now. I only had three of “the one” sprout, but they look good. I tagged them and put them in with my pimpinellifolium cherry mix. I’m no good at hand pollinating tomatoes but I’ll save lots of seed from them and from the closest by cherries.
Tomorrow is my usual date of last frost. I did what I could this weekend. Outplanted a few hundred tomatoes mostly for new crosses and the growouts for EFN. Have a few hundred more that haven’t sized up yet.
Have not yet gotten to the annual direct seeding project including what I offered to do for this group with Joseph Lofthouse’s promiscuous tomato project lines.
Looks like I have about ten each of “The One” and “R18” just getting true leaves. I think I need to plant a few others this week and then hopefully the direct seeding next weekend.
Jens I will talk to you a bit, maybe tomorrow after work in a chat, about the possibility of some tomato volunteering- my thought was in advancement of your idea of a sauce tomato grex and a cherry tomato grex.
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Sounds good.
I wasn’t sure if others had desires for separating the tomatoes into groups since some people want them for specific things - sauce, slicing, etc.
Last year everyone got turned into sauce at my house because the cherries went bonkers with production and the others were slow to get going. I know that I wouldn’t want my cherries crossing with my bigger tomatoes in the event that they bring down the size of the sauce tomatoes. Not sure if others care or if the thought of the cherries crossing to possibly “up” the production of the sauces/slicers at the risk of bringing down the size would be acceptable.
Do you know if the tomato grex last year had everything in it? I don’t remember what was decided (if anything) with that whole thing.
From what I remember, it had everything that folks sent in.
One point against a cherry tomato grex. I expect to get a lot of cherry tomatoes from my wild crosses. I expect to select fairly strongly back towards larger tomatoes. Why? Cherry tomatoes take me much longer to pick. I like cherry tomatoes, but they get overwhelming fast and I typically stop picking them much once the bigger tomatoes get going good. I think I would be happy with just a few plants of cherry tomatoes unless I was raising them for seed or for market sales.
When I plant cherry tomatoes, rather than relying on volunteers I only plant about thirty or so. I start them in pots, ten seeds per pot and then plant the entire pot in clumps. This year I planted two clumps of ten or so plants and three plants of “the one” all right beside each other in a spot about 2 ft x 4 ft. I also transplanted about 1/2 a dozen volunteers into the mix.
We don’t do much of anything with cherries except eat them fresh in salads and graze on them while working in the garden. The vast majority usually are just left to rot or composted, guess that’s why they volunteer all over the place.
I don’t think that is really a serious issue to worry about. Random tomato crosses are rare and if they happen easily recognized, just don’t mix seed from any that are suspect with either of your distinct types.
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“Cherry tomatoes take me much longer to pick.”
Ugh, I had some red currant cherry tomatoes last year that were the bane of our garden. They were prolific, tiny, and obnoxious to pick. I totally understand.
Yep, cherries are for grazing most of the time. I had such a poor turnout with the bigger tomatoes I started gathering the cherries in a quart jar in the fridge, and when it would get full every couple days I’d blend it up into sauce.
The clump planting idea intrigues me. I may put some seeds straight into the ground where some of the transplants have already failed and let the seeds figure themselves out. The soil blocks that have multiple sprouts all get to stay together instead of trying to tease them apart this year. Grow or don’t grow, but I’m not going to fuss with you this year, seedlings.
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That’s the way I look at it. We really only need three or four cherry tomato plants to supply more than we want. Three or four well-tended plants or three or four “you’re on your own” clumps do about the same thing.
I go with the clumps because there are lot of mixed-up genetics in mine and once in a while a really cool one shows up. I don’t know it until they start ripening and when I identify one, I track its stem back down to the ground and clip the stems of the more boring ones closest to it.
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I just potted up the Lofthouse promiscuous wild cross tomatoes from my first flat into an 18 flat and replanted the original 40 flat with 10 seeds of each of four kinds. R18 and The One again. Then an orangish bicolor from a direct seeding I did of Lofthouse promiscuous wild cross tomatoes and then some seeds of a better flavored Lofthouse panamorous direct seed.
I have yet to direct seed any tomatoes this year. I may be out of working rototillers as well. Though I have four unused gardens still so far- though one of them has too much grass growing in a big chunk of it.
Struggling a bit this year.
Hand hoed two gardens and a part of a third and direct seeded quite a bit of Lofthouse Promiscuous wild cross tomatoes!
I direct seeded about 210 row feet of tomato seed from Joseph’s promiscuous tomato project. 70 row feet of The One! 10 row feet of R18 and 130 row feet of a mix which included a variety including XL reds, bicolor which turned red or pink after being planted next to the XL strain the prior year. A few bicolor exserted favorites from prior direct seeding efforts. The panamorous direct seeded project was included. I used two isolation gardens for the direct seedings.
In a third garden which also has some unrelated transplants I planted 70 row feet of my Mission Mountain Morning, The One!, Little Pumpkins, and Mission Mountain Sunrise grex as saved mixed from last year in the hopes of finding some last-ditch crosses. Though such crosses may also show up potentially in this year’s The One! direct seeded block.
Seedlings in the second flat are germinating- all four types. I plan to plant a few of the seedlings in planters that usually have tomatoes. The rest will go into one of the gardens.
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Yesterday with my rototillers still broken I was hoeing up the area where I direct seeded the last two years and not finding any volunteers yet. Figured if there were any they would be new cotyledons so that was what I was looking for. Found a big one about three inches across. I am pretty sure it is a Lofthouse promiscuous project one, the location and something subtle about the leaf shape. Then started finding more but all were smaller. Also found some likely full domestics along the edge of that garden where it borders my wife’s cut flower garden and her more robust soil amendments- volunteer tomatoes like my wife’s garden. I swiped a couple volunteers back and transplanted them back into my territory. Then I potted up ten or so sprouts from the compost too. Volunteer garden in last year’s diversity garden!
I most often don’t keep volunteers but have some this year that I decided to leave, right where they are. They are the only potato leaf type I have and I’m not sure where they originally came from.
They came up earlier and are bigger than the other volunteers I’m finding. There were about a dozen of them all in a clump, but a light frost and a lot of little snails thinned it down to just three at the seedling stage. The look really strong and healthy right now.
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