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Cooler temperatures and strong, direct light bring out the color
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I am still trying to find out why I am getting such an array of expression of the blue coloration in the immature fruit, stems and leaves. One of the areas I am growing the tomatoes is up in the mountains, so high the clouds are nestled around the peaks and the clouds drift by the greenhouse and field plots. Misting nearly all day and it hampered my potato breeding work in the field. So I worked in the greenhouse taking notes and picking the early ripe tomatoes from the first earlies.
None of the first earlies have blue genes.
Yesterday and today I took some more photos of the P-20 Blues and the hybrids. I made a series of crosses: Hybrid blues to hybrid blues of different fruit colors and shapes. By making these crosses, fully one quarter of the progeny will be true breeding blues with a variety of other characteristics floating around. I see that many of my backcrosses are taking; A yellow segregate of the selfed population of (Match X Green Zebra) X Blue with a fruit of this hybrid bred back to blue. The seed will include half true blues and half carrying the blue gene. The need for homozygous blues is important to get the full expression of blue.
I see some great hybrid vigor in most of the blue crosses. I am putting white labels on the tomato trusses to aid the picking process later. I often look at the tomato plants without referring to the pedigree and can almost almost identify the blue crosses just by looking at the foliage and fruit shoulders. I then look at my map to see which hybrid it is.
Some of you know my variety Green Sleeves, aka, Green Sausage. The crosses I am making using this background will allow more light to penetrate the narrow leaves and hanging basket type vines. By making the fruit longer and with more shoulder color, the blue should be spectacular.
My friend, Woody, asked what color the blue and Green Zebra crosses will turn out to be. Turquoise? I told him I was looking for a Sherwin Williams paint type. A globe half covered in paint. Imagine a green zebra type with a blue shoulder.....What?....A
Blue Zebra?
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Wow, what a tomato, where do you lay your hands on seed for these?
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That question is from Frog of Kent, England. My response is that I won't be sending any of the original seed of P-20 out, but time will tell if any of the segregations merit a release. I will be showing PowerPoint photos of the blues, the hybrids and seedlings showing the segregation of blue stems. Frog should try to drive from Kent to Oxford, England this October 24 to view this presentation first hand. I will be addressing how such germplasm may be made more easily available. I should be close to an answer by that time after my many workshops in Europe this Fall. In fact Oxford will be my last stop. There is room for only 25 attendees as I take it.
When I get around to it I will post some more photos on my blog.
Tom Wagner