Virile Males?
 

I just read a thread that described SunGold as a "generous pollen donor ". As a novice tomato breeder I would really like a list of varieties known to be good pollen donors. What has worked well for you?

[QUOTE=M.SeanF.;583042]I just read a thread that described SunGold as a "generous pollen donor ". As a novice tomato breeder I would really like a list of varieties known to be good pollen donors. What has worked well for you?[/QUOTE]

I know no one has answered you and I'm not sure how to answer you either,since I haven't bred tomatoes and don't intend to, and am not sure what you mean when you refer to virile males.

What I can share with you after growing over about 4,000 tomato varieties is that if the pollen bearing stamens didn't have enough pollen that would fall to the female stigma,there would be no pollenization and no fruit development since self pollenization happens almost all the time.

The only other ways it can happen is by parthenocarpy,where fruits can form in the absence of direct pollination,or if there's been a mutation in the formation of the pollen or stamens or other male structures.

Carolyn

To tell the truth the tittle of the thread spooked me so I didn't look at it.:?:lol:

Worth

To tell the truth the title intrigued me so I looked at it. :P

I knew what he was up to, so I looked .. haha.:lol:

Joseph is a land race growers, but in his posts you might find some good info. I know he was doing a study looking for certain types of blooms for better pollination.

[url]http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=36730[/url]

[url]http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=30557[/url] especially read post # 9

I would think that the list of 'good pollen donors' would be extremely huge.
wondering why Sungold would be singled out as a generous pollen donor, and can only think that Sg sets well in a variety of conditions, so maybe a reduced tendency for pollen to clump in humid weather for example might explain free flowing pollen when others are not?
For my own part, I would say that all the larger fruited varieties I've taken pollen from (by tapping the bloom with a finger) have been 'generous' and that the sheer amount of pollen is proportional to the size of the bloom and number of anthers, unless there is a reason that no pollen is flowing, such as: flower is not mature, or wrong time of day/temperature and pollen not being released. There are times when I can't get much pollen from anything. Other times, it is easy to get pollen from any flower that is fully mature.

I figured it was either about tomatoes, or Austin Powers.:roll:

My personal rule of thumb is that "good pollen donor" is too low on the list of characteristics to worry about. Most varieties provide decent amounts of pollen, and I think it is best to focus on other traits (like color, flavor, vigor, etc.).

I only think about the better pollen donors (and receivers) once I have a cross that I want to make over and over. At that point, I will consider how to set up which variety in a pair should be used as the male, and which should be used as the female.

Thanks for the responses. I tried a couple more crosses Sunday. I think my problem is timing. My garden is a 25 minute drive from my house so I usually can't get there until it's already too warm. Next year I'll try earlier in the season. The single cross that has taken for me so far has now become a nice big tomato, so I have at least one success.

[QUOTE=M.SeanF.;583519]Thanks for the responses. I tried a couple more crosses Sunday. I think my problem is timing. My garden is a 25 minute drive from my house so I usually can't get there until it's already too warm. Next year I'll try earlier in the season. The single cross that has taken for me so far has now become a nice big tomato, so I have at least one success.[/QUOTE]

Pollen availability is very weather dependent. Some years(or days) you can vibrate a flower and get copious pollen and other years nothing. That's why I like to harvest blooms intended to be the male and collect and store the pollen for later pollination. That way I'm not dependent on both plants having a flower at the right stage when I want to make a cross.

BTW, Congratulations on your success!!!

This is totally speculative, but when I first started playing around with breeding I had very little success getting fruit to set, so what I started doing was grabbing one bud from each variety I wanted to use as a donor and mixing all the pollen together. This way I could end up with a couple dozen different sets of DNA in a single fruit. Sounds haphazard, but all of the lines I'm working on stabilizing now actually derived from that method. Anyway, based on the genes that popped up in later generations I'd say that green zebra and blondekopfchen must have been really heavy pollen producers, or had particularly viable pollen, because the gs and multiflora genes appeared in a very high percentage of descendants.