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Old January 15, 2015   #1
FLRedHeart
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Join Date: Aug 2014
Location: FL 8b/9a
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Default Stressed tomato's saved seed

I was wondering about your experiences with saving seeds from a stressed tomato fruit. Here is an example situation which brought it up:

I have a plant normally with a mild beefsteak ribbing form and is very meaty and doesn't have many seeds. A single tomato came out with a beautiful ribbing and color pattern that I could call it pleated. All other tomatoes are typical on the same plant.

It was time to save the seeds because of a bad frost that injured the plants and caused mold to attack the shoulders of the tomatoes somewhat, and its other two sister plants, so it was time to get as diverse selection of saved seeds as possible since that is important for these.

Sliced open the spoked-ribbed tomato and to my surprise it was not dense, but each rib had a beautiful hollow design and symmetrical like a professionally sliced pizza ... and was 1/3 filled connected to the core pulp with big, healthy looking seeds. The rest on that plant and other plants were all typical, meaty, few seeds, tiny locules that don't appear at first glance to be very symmetrical - the sort you need to dig for the seeds.

After thinking about it, I have some opinions but I would like to hear what experience is here. This particular tomato happened to be the first on that plant and I had trimmed some of its leaves since they were low and got less light, and perhaps were in a cooler zone, but really not by much and that's a stretch. I wrote it off as a cold stressed, sugar-deprived tomato, but then I found it tasted just as good as the rest, which isn't up to the tomato's potential due to the low light in general, but it certainly had the flavor of the rest and no trace of cardboardy, etc. off flavor.

I did save the seeds and unfortunately/fortunately (??!) together with the rest. Do you all agree with the cause for this perfecty round spoke-like ribbing (scallopped, neatly from stem to blossom end like a squash or globe with longitude lines) vs. incredible Hulk style varied bulging ribbing on the rest (meaning your typical random rib thicknesses and randome locule sizes), and while I think the fertility and genes ought to be the same and it was just caused by the environment, it was a very beautiful tomato before the mold got started. Because it formed so many seeds, it is half of the saved seed, and the other plants even with two tomatoes each, say 1/4 each. I would like to hear any comment you have on this scenario and my thoughts and questions. Thanks in advance!

Last edited by FLRedHeart; January 15, 2015 at 08:03 PM. Reason: spelling
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