Quote:
Originally Posted by augiedog55
Tania, I got a question. I see you had several tomatoes weren't true to type. This is my question. I bought alot of seeds from suggested seed vendures on this site to try next yr. What % of these seeds should I expect not to be true to variety. You have me wondering.
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I think if you grow every single seed that you purchased from commercial sources, you may get less than 3% of a chance cross. This is a pretty good record, in my opinion.
Seed from SSE Yearbook and individual seed savers are crossed/mixed more often, in my experience. I get about 10-15% of these not correct. The reason being when seed trades are done, lots of different seeds are being packaged at the same time, and a chance of mix or mislabeling is higher than in a commercial packaging environment, when 1 variety is packaged at a time. Also individuals grow many plants of different varieties (and often only 1 plant of a specific variety), and hence chances of crosses are higher than in large commercial fields.
Sometimes a cross is not fully stabilized when seeds are released, and this brings more offtypes.
Also it is not uncommon for a person to be saving seeds for a variety that did not grow true to type (and they did not know enough about the variety to see it) - when they share/trade these seeds, the wrong one propagates further.
So in my opinion, commercial seeds are more 'reliable'. Mistakes happen there too, there is no absolute guarantee, but it happens much less frequently.
EDITED TO ADD: I consistently notice that the seeds that I am getting from folks in the southern states are much more frequently crossed compared with the seeds I am getting from the northern folks (which are almost never crossed). It may have to do with pollinator activity patterns during fruit set.