4 posts were merged into an existing topic: Manually crossing tomatoes
I bet the regular leafs from Hoosier Rose are crosses with your regular leafs Reed. Those crosses might be fairly valuable to you as it’s possible that your survivors may survive for different reasons. I sometimes plant whole community flats of my potato leaf seed just for a few hybrids.
I suspect that as a group potato leafs suffer from low genetic diversity and high degrees of relatedness. Every potato leaf x regular leaf cross we make though works to fix that. I’ve now got plants that are potato leaf from three crosses in my garden so by pedigree only a small percentage the original potato leaf I started with.
Sounds like if a regular leaf shows up from potato leaf seeds, it’s an automatically confirmed cross. I probably have thousands of Hoosier Rose seeds accumulated over several years. Maybe next year I’ll plant a whole bunch of them and see if I can find some.
Or, if people are interested, I could send most of that seed to others with promise I get seed back from any crosses that show up. Are you the tomato steward?
Yep I have agreed to steward the tomatoes!
A mini update. I left the unplanted seedlings of Lofthouse promiscuous project things in the greenhouse to harden off for the week along with my flat of volunteers. I transplanted the little flat of forty cells into two 18 cell trays, One of which is all “The One” now and from the packet that contained in part the seed from the plant with what I would consider normal seed production. Also have another tray with some of The One! from the same packet. Not quite sure where to plant them. There may be a few gaps and a little bit of empty space in the all “The One” garden and that may be where the “The One” Generation Three (in my garden) transplant seedlings go.
Out in the gardens I hoed and weeded in several gardens including the two Lofthouse promiscuous project direct seeded gardens. Germination seems ok, maybe a few small gaps.
Update! I planted the rest of the tomatoes which included all of the seedlings I started for this project plus a few volunteers from my compost. Some of which it turns out are Mission Mountain something…
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The tomato transplants for this project survived the week and the direct seeded ones are much bigger.
I have tons of green tomatoes right now, including on the “the one” but have only a few cherry or pimp types ripened so far. The sun just won’t shine this year, but not much rain either, so I guess that’s why.
Its cloudy today and our long-range forecast shows sun for tomorrow and the next day but then cloudy again for the next full week. We probably haven’t had a full week of sunny days in the last six weeks. This happened a few years ago for the whole month of August, weird.
Fruits on “the one” have been there forever it seems like but still not a hint of color other than green.
Very cool! Very inspiring how thickly planted they are.
What is your philosophy on pruning tomatoes? Ever do it?
They don’t have to be that thick- and they can be too thick. This stand seems healthy enough except for one spot where I threw out a final handful of seeds. If too thick they’ll outcompete themselves essentially and produce nothing.
I prune sometimes to let a desirable small tomato plant continue to survive next to a larger usually much more vigorous tomato plant.
I don’t need to prune for disease as I don’t have much disease.
Today 7-16-2023 the mostly direct seeded Lofthouse promiscuous project tomatoes. Freshly watered I might add. The Northwest field with The One! descendants got too wet on the East end and has dry spots.
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I was just out looking at my three plants of “the one”. Early set fruits are still not ripening but not rotting either, so I guess that’s good. Plants are only about a foot tall and seem not to want to grow taller, is that normal for them? Neighboring, pimp cross plants have topped the four-foot fence and hanging down the other side.
All other tomatoes are looking good, growth and foliage wise and lots of green tomatoes but none except the pimp-cross are ripening. A few of them are rotting. I don’t know what to blame it on other than the weird lack of sunshine that has persisted since early June.
Yep that is normal, they are some kind of dwarf that appeared as a side effect of the wild crosses. The only question in my mind was how tall they would get in your soil and climate. The slow ripening might be tied to the fancy flavor.
The tallest one I have is the one in a large pot. It might be two feet presently.
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The first tomato of “the one” plants has turned red. I’m going to pick it today and see how it tastes. There are only five or six fruits total on the three plants. They have stopped growing at about a foot tall and have some browning and curling of the lower leaves. They stopped blooming a while back so those few fruits are all there will be. One nice looking tomato dropped off the plant while green.
I’m not overly impressed by this wild cross. They are crowded in beside the pimp mess and have not competed well, or at all, but they all had equal chances and opportunity. I am looking forward though to seeing how they taste.
I’ll do another post later with some photos.
Definitely not the most competitive strain! I mixed some seed in with the more competitive strains but the direct seeded The One and the direct seeded R18 are much smaller than the general population. I suspect that strains that have previously been successfully direct seeded like Joseph’s polyamorous direct seeded are more competitive. Interesting to hear how it does in your climate though!
Nope, not that competitive at all. Hate to give a bad grow report but I can’t report finding any good qualities, at least that manifest in my climate. There are five or six more perfectly fruits across the three plants that may be a little better than this first one. It was developing a rot spot, so I went ahead and picked it.
The flavor was largely nonexistent and unappealing and texture sort of mushy. Three or four seeds is all it had, and I lost them. There should be more in the other fruits, which I hop may be better flavor. That is possible isn’t it, that the seeds are in a genetically evolving state, and they might display different phenotypes? Anyway, here is the one fruit so far.
And what it looked like inside, shoot forgot to put something in for scale, it was about two inches across.
Still very interesting! Two years ago the grandmother was the best tasting so far. Last year the children were pretty variable for flavor. None seemed bad, but few were close to as good. Wish I had been more careful to pick a favorite flavored one again- was hoping to produce enough seed to share more widely. Sounds like yours is on the bad side again.
If I had to guess at the ideal climate for The One! population I would say California. Though I am in the process of finding out if it can in fact, at least in part, survive direct seeded in my climate which I think of as the ultimate way to find out if it is early enough or create a population that is early enough. There was one plant last year that produced far more seed than most which were few seeded. So there is some potential for change within the population, though I wonder if there is enough? It is a very uniform looking population in the appearance of the plants. Seems like little sign of outcrossing last year is present and I recombined in seed from plants from crossing blocks that should have had a higher chance of that. I would expect an outcrossed plant to loose the dwarfing and be quite a bit larger and perhaps have a different leaf color.
If that softening started early it might be forced ripening and flavour didn’t fully develop. Or taste from that soft might go trough the fruit with liquids. Maybe those other fruits taste better and growth is better if competition is more equal.