Harvested 2 tomatoes yesterday 
Hard to tell them apart!
Beautiful. Stunning colour on the larger one.
Pretty tasty too! Not landrace yet - the larger is Black Sea Man (BSM), the smaller is a pimpinellifolium. BSM has huge potato leaves, a thick stem and fairly short, and does well in Northern climate (the favourite of a friend of mine in Norther Sweden), and tastes great. These are all traits I value, especially the large fruit size - this one is 172g (thatās 6 ounces) vs the pimp which is 1.3g, making it 132 times larger!!! However, itās said to be susceptible to disease. Iām using this as one of my main breeding partners in attempting to make a new hybrid swarm for starting a new landrace. There are earlier tomatoes but I figure a lot of earliness might have to do with size, so I figure since I will anyway loose so much size crossing with wild tomatoes, I want to start with as much size I can get - this seemed a good option. Iāll be relying on the wilds (and some domestic-wild crosses) for the disease resistance.
It would be cool if someone figured out some kind of size:earliness ratio, and checked that against the same rations when domestics are crossed with wilds. I speculate that perhaps two variables, we could say āearliness powerā and āsizeā, might be interacting to give us what manifests as earliness, in such a way that if you cross them with wilds and eventually breed them to the same ā¦ letās say āmediumā size, perhaps some of the larger apparently less early ones will turn out to have actually more āearliness powerā as a variable isolated from size, if you see what I mean.
If anyone has experience with this Iād be very interested to hear about it! But thatās my working hypothesis for now anyway.
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My experience is that size has very little effect on earliness if compared to whole lifecycle. Maybe difference of 10 days between earliest small and earliest big. Even earliness donāt help if they have tendency to make fruit over long period rather than in very short period. Part of earliness might be lost in that, but to me itās better trait if all ripen in time versus having to ripeng most indoors. I grew moskovitch many years because itās one of the earliest big tomatoes, but crop did not ripen in time and even indoors it took a long time. Large barred boar, that I sent to you, was maybe week later on first fruit than moskovitch, but ripened all weeks before and actually had more fruit in total. On cherry tomatoes itās a little better trait that fruit ripen over little longer period as it would be painfull to pick bushes full at once. Still for me they need to be fast enough and have short enough ripening period that there would not be many greens left. Large barred boar has also had flower to ripe fruit period comparable to fastest cherries, only āslowā flowering is holding it back.
When people talk about early, mid-season etc., what is it that theyāre referring to? I was assuming time to harvest.
How about, letās say, time for a plant to produce the first kg of ripe fruit? Or 2kg of ripe fruit? That would be a useful metric for me.
Yes, that makes total sense and would be the most useful thing for me too, although it would be nice to have some producing earlier so that one can eat tomatoes early and late, as opposed to having to wait so long for eating any.
From seed website here in the UK, it seems the only recommend the larger ones for growing in greenhouses.
Wow. I would not think of that as āearlyā then. Perhaps the way I think of āearlyā is different to how the term is usually used!
Yes, thatās exactly what I wish for too. Well, that and also hopefully some tomatoes to eat early on too!
And I think disease resistance and ability to grow in colder temperatures or lower light levels, might help extend the season too, right?
And yes Iām very grateful to have LBB and crosses of it. Those are also a very high priority for my breeding program! Havenāt been crossing with them until just the last week when I got the first flowers. So with any luck, some Galapagos crosses with those will be coming, and as more flowers come Iāll try with some other species too such as arcanum.
There might even be some chance of arcanum crosses being able to survive dormant in the winter here, giving them a head start the next year. Not sure on that but I saw some indication arcanum might be able to do that from a grower in France, so that would be cool if true and even cooler if that can happen with crosses also.
I forget if we have talked about Black Sea Manā¦ do you have a sense how BSM and LBB compare in Swedish growing conditions in terms of size of fruit and time to maturity for the bulk of the crop? Just curious. Although LBB has also the added advantage of being more disease resistant, so far as I understand.
Yes there are certainly early and late varieties. Maybe late varieties tend to more heavily big, but in terms of absolute fastest to ripen diffrence isnāt that big. Maybe in breeding earliness hasnāt been priority on bigs and thatās why there are lotās of late season varieties, but very early bigs do exist. On LBB I have had 500g fruit faster from flower to ripe fruit than many cherry tomatoes so itās not really size that makes the difference.
Maybe itās physiological also. I mean, to grow more fruit mass maybe takes more time, which would feed into my theory about the combined variables of earliness + bigness. This would potentially explain why the earliest are small.
Aside from LBB, what are the earliest big tomatoes you know? I have interest in Uluru Ochre, it seems maybe this would be a good candidate to breed with. Apparently great taste, larger than BSM and LBB, and perhaps early enough.
I guess dealing with lower light intensity may be somewhat separate from earliness, and that may be important for people like us vs. those in the US who have a short season but hotter Summers with more and stronger sunshine. (Well, less cloudy than the UK, not sure about how your sun-hours compare but at least you must have lower light intensity when the Sun does shine).
Iām curious how Uluru Ochre will do. I just ordered seed - rather late, but, perhaps I can force it to give some pollen in time for making some crosses with it.
Iām also curious to see how height and stem fatness go with interspecial crosses. Iāve been concentrating on fat stems and short height in the domestics. But I donāt know how the resultant crosses with wilds would compare on those variables with crossing wilds to more ordinary determinates.
There might be some, but itās really minimal compared to difference in fruit size. Like if you have 10g fruit and 500g fruit that ripen within 10days (lets say 40day/50day) it really doesnāt seem like sizing up matters when fruit size ratio is 1/50. I have had many that ripen fruit earlier or about same time as LBB from sowing and some also ripen whole crop faster, but I donāt think any have had as fast from flower to fruit. Usually bigs and many cherries ripen within few days of 2 months from flower, but LBB has consistently been 50-55days and I think some fruits with dry conditions closer to 45days. Usually what is sold as early season have ripened atleast first fruits here so thatās max 3 weeks later than the fastest from sowing. Last year I had taxi yellow, gold dust, precocibec, siberian early and those LBB crosses ripen before LBB. Siberian early has been earliest big. It also ripens more like 55 days from flower. One thing to note about ripening times is that big transplant size might stress plants and ripen earlier same as with any stress conditions so I wouldnāt just look at how fast they ripen, but also how much they yield. Or if there is a big cap between first flowers and main flowering. That usually tells that there has been some stress and first to ripen was an outlier. One reason why I try to plant them small before flowering so they grow more naturally.