Septoria and early blight resistance in Solanum habrochaites

[FredB]

Just for fun, I tried growing out the rootstock tomato Emperador Hybrid. It was definitely S. habrochaites: enormous plant with 1" diameter stem, fuzzy silver leaves, large flowers, and small hard green fruit that never ripened. Interestingly, this variety showed complete resistance to Septoria and intermediate resistance to early blight. This observation isn't entirely unexpected: the following thread by Fusion_power mentions Septoria resistance in two S. habrochaites lines.

http://tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=33010

I saved seed from an F2 plant and grew out the F3 this year, and all the plants were resistant to Septoria. Resistance to early blight was all over the map, varying from highly susceptible to highly resistant.

This variety isn't easy to cross. Out of a dozen attempts, I got only one fruit and only about 20 seeds. This was a cross with Brandywine. I'm planning to grow out several plants this summer and I'll report how they did.

At this time, I have a good supply of F2 seed from Emperador Hybrid if anyone is interested. I also took a cutting from the most EB-resistant F3 plant and am growing it in the greenhouse, so I might have F4 seed by this spring.

Fred