[joseph]

Results of the frost tolerance trial are as follows. The plants were snowed on, and exposed to radiant freezes on a number of occasions.

Labels disintegrated on the plant in the coldest field. Nevertheless, I though it was interesting that of the 26 domestic varieties that were trialed, 3 of the 4 survivors had yellow fruits. Only 6 of the 26 that were trialed were from yellow fruited varieties.

In the warmer field, 4 of 10 survivors were descended from plants with yellow fruits. (Two of them had red fruits, and were from the promiscuous pollination project, so they seem to be natural hybrids.)

So only 23% of what was planted came from yellow fruited mothers, but 75% and 40% of the survivors came from yellow fruited plants.

I don't know if that's just chance, or if yellow fruits are somewhat closely linked with better frost/cold tolerance. I suspect that 2 of the survivors in each field contain genetics from S. habrochaites. One of the survivors in the warmer field contains the blue gene.

S. peruvianum, S. habrochaites, and S. pimpinellifolium, showed good frost/cold tolerance. This is two years in a row that my population of S. pimpinellifolium has survived the frost/cold tolerance test. Too bad that the flowers are so tiny and hard to work with.

In the warmer field, 3 of the 7 survivors are descended from Jagodka, which won the grand prize in my cold tolerance trials a few years ago. Discussions about Jagodka's traits inspired the promiscuous pollination project and the self-incompatibility project. Jagodka was part of this trial, and failed the frost part of the test as expected. I feel content that it's genetics for cold tolerance are still part of this project.