We had our first fall frost on Friday night. That makes this year's frost free growing season 67 days long. It's no wonder that so many tomato varieties fail in my garden. That's some tough growing conditions.
Of the 72 new varieties that I trialed this year, only 4 of them produced ripe fruit, and that in meager amounts. One of them produced fruits not much bigger than a current tomato. So it was culled. One was early enough to produce two fruits weighing about 10 ounces, and the flowers had exerted stigmas, so it has been invited into the promiscuously pollinating breeding project next year.
The other two varieties are being added to what I'm thinking of as The Neighbor's Landrace. People keep giving me fruits from tomatoes that they grew in their gardens. I'm collecting the seeds into a common lot, and intend to grow them out next season. Just to see if anything works for me.
I've been tasting every fruit before saving seeds from it. The taste of orange and red/yellow bi-color tomatoes is really working well for me this year. A lady gave me a Cherokee Purple fruit to try. I was not impressed.
I planted a lot of WildX-5 tomato. I also shared it abundantly this spring as potted plants. I've been taking lots of fruit to the farmer's market for taste testing. So far it has had glowing reports regarding taste. Nobody has badmouthed it. It needed a name that people could remember, so I'm calling the family "Wild Zebra". I've collected around 1000 seeds, so if germination is OK, I expect to share seeds this winter. It's an indeterminate, which I don't care for, but it has produced lots of early tasty fruit.
One nice thing about using orange tomatoes in a promiscuous pollination project, is that it makes it trivial to locate naturally occurring hybrids when red fruits show up among descendants of an orange fruited mother. This year, the off-type plants are about 10% among the lines that I have been selecting for promiscuous traits. I'm saving those separate to replant, so that I can reselect for promiscuous traits. The natural hybrids that I identified this season also brought the closed flower traits with them, so re-selection will focus first on getting rid of closed-flower traits. The nice thing about using natural hybrids, is that by the time I identify a hybrid plant, it has already produced F2 seed. So I just have to plant it and select.
Best time of the year to be a tomato breeder! The results of so many experiments are becoming visible this month.
|