[bower]

In the past couple of seasons I've been giving more thought to the maternal DNA lineages in my crosses, due to reading some work that suggested earliness (and some other important traits) were more easily recovered if the trait was maternal. My own results may tend to agree with this, as I seem to have lost Kimberley's earliness when I crossed the same line to Medovaya Kaplya (MK mother) which was easy to recover in the original cross with Zolotye Kupola.

It is especially easy to select earliness from the Kimberley lines, because much of it comes from the genetics of precocious flowering. As you can see in the table below, Kimberley and her early offspring flower much earlier than the typical tomato, at around 45 days. This means you can identify the trait at planting time, and it is worthwhile to grow some extra seedlings every generation just to make sure the earliness is recovered - if it matters to you. It does for us, because we have such a short season.