I wonder if trying to remove just the end of the anther cone might help that then? Basically just making non-exserted stigmas exserted. Or for exserted ones, just leaving them as they are and applying pollen, and either leaving them like that after pollinating them, or even maybe covering the flower to prevent access to pollinators?
Worth trying. There are a lot of different instructions available and some of those may cover ways to cover flowers so that they don’t dry out after emasculation.
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If not each climbing each other, then certainly the plants in the milpa or the forest… I thought of you when editing the Nightshade lesson written by Marcos.
“We are also looking for plants that climb stalks (corn stubble) and do not remain at ground level since the fruits are susceptible to fungi.”
And (including just for fun) Bartolo has some examples of currant tomatoes in the milpa in this video.
Too bad the whole milpa patch to support the climbing tomatoes would be hard to replicate in your living room! But if you did it would be very unique 
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Nice. Those tomatoes remind me of my pimpinellifolium plants - they climb well! It’s like rather than a bean climbing way, they put out their leaves and they hook on to other leaves around from the other plants. And climb all over the furniture!
This is such a wonderful example of what growers who only have small spaces can do to contribute to plant breeding. Those of us with plenty of outdoor space quickly run out of time and attention to do controlled hand crosses. People without greenhouses could potentially set up tiny tissue culture labs to do different exciting work. You are right though about staying connected with field growers so the hybrids can undergo evaluation in the real world.
On your questions- I agree there should be some way to induce maturity in your tomatoes as young as possible to speed up generation times. This paper reviews the factors that induce flowering in tomato (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/272666320_The_transition_to_flowering_in_tomato).
samach2007.pdf (1.3 MB)
Grafting might also be an option (or you could play around with mentor grafting too since this family seems susceptible to horizontal gene transfer from this approach).
Spider mites are a bit like fungus in that they mostly rely on temp/humidity being right to allow them to proliferate. Im guessing your greenhouse is too humid for soybean to be really happy.
Have you considered trying some wider hand crosses with your rice breeding? Grasses are unusually flexible when it comes to cross pollinating between genera. And grass pollen is normally pretty easy to store so you dont have to line up flowering times.
Thanks, I’ll have a read of that later. I think I found the full text, here:
https://www.jstage.jst.go.jp/article/plantbiotechnology/24/1/24_1_71/_pdf/-char/en
To give you an idea of my timing, I first wet the seed of a Black Sea Man (large tomato, last I picked was 172g) to start germination, on February 26th. I harvested the first ripe tomato last week, so less than 3 and a half months in total. And that’s with zero sunshine. That seems quite pleasing. That was grown in a 5 litre bucket using Kratky hydroponics. That’s a fast method, though I can make them flower sooner using small containers - I have many tomatoes growing in beer cans using Kratky. I will maybe have to transfer the domestics to larger containers now I’ve started crossing with them, but the wild ones, maybe I will keep until harvest in those cans. And for pollen production, that method seems really useful. I have some cheesmaniae pollen already, for example. For using as female larger is probably better since more flowers is useful. But for pollen, it’s maybe enough.
I also harvested my first crossed seeds, Wilding X Solanum arcanum, I think I wet those seeds in January, and grew in soil - have been eating those tomatoes for a couple of weeks and am really pleased to get 2 good looking seeds from that cross. I should start germinating them now really. But very busy with planting outside and also all the indoor plants I am still taking care of. Many crossed fruits to tend to! As for the arcanum and various other wild species, I’m not sure how to tell for sure if the fruits are ready without opening them up, so I’m waiting to see if some start dropping, and will take action then.
I’ve tried making mentor grafts a couple of times so I can attempt peruvianum crosses. I do have a peruvianum that’s supposed to be compatible with some of the Lycopersicon group - I’ve made many cross attempts, with domestics, domestic-wild hybrids, and pimpinellifolium, and many fruits are in progress, so we will see if any of those give viable seeds. But as for the other peruvianum accessions I have, I do not expect them to cross without some special means such as, hopefully, mentor grafts. But I have not given that enough attention yet and really need to make a better setup for making mentor grafts - none have survived so far. Using that method I would hope to be able to make successful crosses, as was done in the 50’s by Russians - N.B. not graft hybrids, actual regular hybrids via pollination. The mentor graft is supposed to resolve the endosperm issues.
I have no greenhouse. Just a small room with a tiny window that gets almost no light! And my front room that doesn’t get much sunshine either. So I’m relying on LED lights. In the end I solved the spider mite issue with predator mites. At first I washed all my plants in a solution I made, which ended up killing some of my plants, probably due to spreading some other infection. That seemed to work, but after some weeks they came back. I lost count after washing 140 plants, and I did not want to do that again, nor loose more in the process. Hence opting for predator mites. And, they’re great!
Aphids are another issue. I’m doing a pepper project to. Aphids seem to have no appetite for my domestic tomatoes and most of my wild tomatoes, but they seem to love some cheesmaniae accessions! And peppers. I was the only aphid predator in the house and it was very tiresome. I finally put some predator wasps in the grow room, though not in my front room since I thought we might not get along too well. So, I still predate. I should really move the peppers outside now. But I’m a bit afraid of loosing them. And of the wind - I have issues to solve in terms of Kratky buckets vs. wind, and as for the ones in cans, well, refilling nutrients is a huge issue and that’s way easier indoors. But yes, that is one of my tasks to solve…
That project is kind of on hold since the spider mite episode. I did try planting a bunch of germinated seeds outside but it seems they all died before even a blade of grass appeared. I watered them but apparently not enough. Next time I will probably try them in Kratky. And I might get a chance to grow some bigger then plant them out though I am worried if there’s enough season left.
I didn’t consider wider crosses. I am quite particular about rice. I specifically like East Asian rice. If I can get good East Asian rice to grow well here, that would be great for me. And even better would be black sticky rice growing here. So my main aim there is to try to cross the earliest Japanese normal rice with black sticky rice to make hopefully an early enough black sticky rice for lowland growing method here in the UK. Hopefully that’s possible without having to go wider, which would likely heavily affect the culinary experience. But if someone does it, I would be more than happy to taste it!
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You are hitting it out of the park with your approach. I’m sure you will get around your issues with enough patience. The soviets did a lot of interesting stuff despite(maybe because?) of their divergent views on biology at the time.
Did you hear the theory that insects cannot digest complete proteins, and that plants cannot limit their nitrogen uptake? It means over fertilised plants accumulate free amino acids in their sap, which is rocket fuel for insects, especially sap suckers like aphids. Rebalancing your nitrogen inputs might help you get less insect pressure. If you have low light levels a typical level of added nitrogen might be difficult for the plants to catch enough energy to put to use before it becomes insect accelerator.
Hmm… well, I guess I accept that hydro makes aphids thrive. But sure makes the plants thrive too! I don’t want to mess with the nutrients, keeping it simple for now. Predation seems a good work around for now, this time anyway