This post is at least half tongue-in-cheek, but I am doing it.
On the one hand, I’m not fully convinced that tomatoes can deal with direct-seeding here. On the other hand, last year I got some volunteers that almost ripened. I’m setting aside a corner of the garden for this experiment. This year I’m going to till last year’s promiscuous tomato patch shallowly, so all fallen fruit can be lightly incorporated.
I get a ton of leftover store tomatoes, which I feed to geese that will be run over the spot for several weeks and effectively spread whatever store genetics exist over that spot. Pictures of a fraction of my high quality store seedstock
It’ll also get whatever tomatoes I don’t eat next year thrown on it, a couple each of the relatively early tomatoes, and a couple buckets of tomatoes I harvested last year that froze before I could take the seeds. If any of my currant tomatoes do well this year, I’ll toss some of those into the patch too, or maybe just use that area as the collector for my dead vines at the end of the year.
This is a low-investment, low-thought project in accordance with my energy levels.
As you can see, the geese are also working on creating a feral driveway tomato landrace for me which produced some green fruit last year – in the shade – which they ate before they ripened. Oops.
I am actually trying to do a similar thing starting this year! I am going to try direct seeding and see what seeds I get at the end of the season. I’ve gathered a lot of varieties that i have hopes for, particularly the promiscuous tomatoes but also a frost survivor grex from wild mountain seeds, a lot of the shortest season tomatoes i could find, the florida everglades tomato, etc. I’m growing in Vermont so I really have no idea what will happen but I am excited to see! Neat to find someone who is headed in a similar direction!
In one lecture by professional breeders that I watched they mentioned that they had experience in volunteer populations and they seem to resort back to small cherry tomatoes over time. Something to keep in mind if you have some other directions you want to take them. Small size definetely makes sence as small tend to have higher seed to weight ratio and also ripen faster. If nothing else it’s can be something to use in manual crossings. My plan is to do direct seeding here in similar climate from F2 on, but I plan to use some help to get favourable micro climate that I have more ripe fruit to eat and also do manual selection as I dont have extra space. I have no doubt they couldn’t make atleast some ripe fruit, but don’t have animals I could feed green tomatoes.
That makes sense to me, all of the wild/feral varieties that I found were teeny tiny. And as much as I love a good beefsteak tomato, as long as the cherry tomatoes taste good after a few generations, I will be happy. But maybe this will be interesting to try selecting for size after I have a successful population going!
That is my experience too, they naturally revert to cherry tomatoes. I have a few feral varieties that reseed themselves around my property. Small, but very productive. Unfortunately they don’t taste very good, but I’m not sure a feral variety ever would?
I don’t think direct seeding has to be the end all be all for landrace crops but I think it’s often closely intertwined. I know that personally I don’t want to invest in all of the equipment recommended for seed starting indoors and I am hopeful I have a local environment that can be adapted to within a few generations so I am going to instead invest in a few years of risk and see what happens. But from reading around on this forum, I think a lot of people already have the equipment or get some joy out of starting early and with lots of neat crops. And maybe some environments would be much more challenging to direct seed in and so they supplement.
I still start tomatoes indoors. Just a lot more of them than I used to and then I supplement that with direct seeding. Tomato breeding addiction is real.
With direct seeding conditions are much more even for all plants and so selection pressure is more towards local conditions. With transplants it’s hard to keep conditions so even that coincidence wouldn’t affect, for example watering or lighting. Also I can increase the scale. In my area it’s not ideal for getting harvest at the moment. Transplanting would be better, but it’s better just because my season is so short. Based on my experience transplants only make 2-3 weeks difference in earliness in tomatoes. Same applies to other crops, you only about get 1/3 or 1/4 of your transplant period as headstart at most. Sometimes in some crops starting transplants too early might completely eliminate the advantage because of transplant shock. Right lenght of transplant period gives biggest advantage and plants need less care after also. I have some crops like peppers, eggplants, sweet potatoes etc. that really need transplants and so the less I do transplants in tomatoes and other shorter season crops, the more I can do selection on those crops that aren’t really that suited for direct seeding.
I think this is a brilliant and creative strategy and addition to your tomato ‘hobby’. Coming from you,
however, this is completely unsurprising given your proclivity for very intelligent ideas and strategies in a very challenging growing zone. Excited to hear of what you learn and discover!
I think that’s a brilliant idea! It’s a shame the geese ate all those tomatoes before you could get seeds! Those sound like they were great plants. I hope you get more that are even better from the geese this year.
