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Old April 2, 2015   #16
joseph
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Today a lady asked me what specific traits contribute to my dislike of tomatoes...

So I gave it a lot of thought.... All of the tomatoes that I think are almost palatable are yellow or orange tomatoes. The red color in tomatoes is due to lycopene. I suppose that it tastes too bitter to me. I love the taste of yellow watermelons. I bet because they are also lacking lycopene.

But Green Zebra is one of the most horrid tasting tomatoes to my tongue, and that is due to the acidity, not to lycopene. So a tomato designed for my taste would be perceived as low acid. That can be accomplished by actual lack of acidity or by more sweetness, and perhaps by lack of other bitterness traits. I love yellow cucumbers because even though they are low sugar they lack acidity/bitterness.

So my tomato breeding program now has a new component to it. I'll be moving the population in the direction of tomatoes that taste less objectionable to my taste, so that means towards yellow or orange tomatoes.

Last summer I made a hybrid between Ot'Jagodka, my most productive early saladette tomato and Hillbilly, a yellow beefsteak type. I suppose that if anything useful comes out of that cross that it will become the foundation of my breeding program. I have been growing a couple of F1 plants in the basement this winter. They currently have marble sized fruits on them. I'm projecting that the fruits will ripen 5 weeks later than I like to plant tomato seeds, but that might be sufficient to get F2 seed to plant this summer. That's where the most interesting selection opportunities happen.
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Old April 2, 2015   #17
Stvrob
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Maybe you would be one of the few who enjoy Japanese Black Trifle?
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Old April 2, 2015   #18
joseph
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Maybe you would be one of the few who enjoy Japanese Black Trifle?
Perhaps the Japanese Yellow Truffle. The black looks like it has way too much lycopene.
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Old April 2, 2015   #19
Starlight
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I think one of the first things you may have to do and I know you aren't going to like this part very much is to grow an array of the orange and yellow tomato plant, but instead of letting them grow as a landrace, you'll need to bag at least a couple of fruits from each plant. Once you have them bagged than you can let the rest of the plant go your landrace style.

If you don't bag them, your not going to know exactly which fruits had the best taste for you. If you let them grow landrace style than they could be crossed and you really won't know what you have or if it turned out to be good tasting what the cross may have been to duplicate it or work your breeding program from it.

Unk x Unk may be acceptable for flowers, but not for fruits.

I don't know the names of most tomatoes, but maybe folks here will be able to tell you about some of the yellows and oranges they have grown that they really liked that don't have a long DTM date.

What about the whites, or the ones that are a really pale yellow? Maybe there is something in them you might like. A nice white cherry type I grew the one year was Dr. Carolyn.
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Old April 2, 2015   #20
bower
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Aha! My Mom also prefers yellow or low acid tomatoes - although she likes blacks and pinks too. The ol classic red tomato doesn't agree with her as well.

Joseph, I'm growing some new orange/yellow varieties this year, I'll keep an eye out for the traits you needed - earliness and open flower structures.

I made a cross between Kimberley and Zolotye Kupola, looking for an earlier and medium sized tasty yellow for my Mom - I'll be growing a few F2's this year and will check out the flower structure on those. I have thousands of F2 seeds, but little space for them.
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Old May 7, 2015   #21
joseph
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Bower: Thanks. Determinate and early is really clever for my climate: Getting as much yield as quick as possible seems to be better than getting an early fruit and then dragging out harvest for so long that most of the productivity gets picked as green fruits.

I was at the nursery today and they had two orange tomatoes that looked interesting enough to me to purchase and add to my attempt to create better tasting tomatoes:

Chef's Choice Orange F1
SunSugar Hybrid

I'm thrilled that they are both hybrids. Too bad they are both indeterminate. All sorts of great combinations aught to arise among the offspring.

I passed on Lemon Boy.
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Old May 7, 2015   #22
Gardeneer
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Quote:
Originally Posted by joseph View Post
Bower: Thanks. Determinate and early is really clever for my climate: Getting as much yield as quick as possible seems to be better than getting an early fruit and then dragging out harvest for so long that most of the productivity gets picked as green fruits.

I was at the nursery today and they had two orange tomatoes that looked interesting enough to me to purchase and add to my attempt to create better tasting tomatoes:

Chef's Choice Orange F1
SunSugar Hybrid

I'm thrilled that they are both hybrids. Too bad they are both indeterminate. All sorts of great combinations aught to arise among the offspring.

I passed on Lemon Boy.
I am also trying to grow more determinants than indets, as much as possible ; for two reasons:

1- compact plants, require less efforts to manage and smaller garden space/ container size.
2- They tend to be more early. That is a plus in my short season climate.

I am now actively trying to experiment with dwarfs too. .. Moore fruits, per pond of foliage. Tomato leaves are not edible, alas !!
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Old May 7, 2015   #23
joseph
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I grew dwarfs a few years ago as part of a cold/frost tolerance trial. I didn't care much for them, because they didn't compete as well with weeds as the larger varieties.
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Old May 7, 2015   #24
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I grew dwarfs a few years ago as part of a cold/frost tolerance trial. I didn't care much for them, because they didn't compete as well with weeds as the larger varieties.
Joseph... There are alot of new dwarfs that are out now. You ought to give a few of them another try. I know how well the plants do and how high they get depends on each gardeners growing practices, but you could always ask the folks here about what their average height of the dwarf variety was.
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Old May 7, 2015   #25
joseph
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I think that dwarfs would be great for growing indoors over the winter...
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Old May 7, 2015   #26
bower
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Quote:
Originally Posted by joseph View Post
Bower: Thanks. Determinate and early is really clever for my climate: Getting as much yield as quick as possible seems to be better than getting an early fruit and then dragging out harvest for so long that most of the productivity gets picked as green fruits.

I was at the nursery today and they had two orange tomatoes that looked interesting enough to me to purchase and add to my attempt to create better tasting tomatoes:

Chef's Choice Orange F1
SunSugar Hybrid

I'm thrilled that they are both hybrids. Too bad they are both indeterminate. All sorts of great combinations aught to arise among the offspring.

I passed on Lemon Boy.
Haven't grown SunSugar but Sungold is without a doubt one of the earliest and most cold tolerant I've seen, I think they're of the same bloodline (sap-line?).
An early orange determinate you might want to try is Orange-1 (aka Belarus Orange). Really early, nice fruit and good setter. Taxi is another that gets kicked around (I haven't grown it but I think it is determinate too?). I think both are a medium sized slicer.
I'm growing Bursztyn (from Poland) which I believe is a smaller fruit, and Yellow Clusters (from Ukraine) this time.. I believe they are indeterminates too, but will wait and see.. Not as early as Moravsky Div and the F2's, but doing fine. I have three Kim Kupola's with big, half open buds this several days now, so should get a look at the flowers soon. DTF looks to match the precocious mother on these 3 out of 4 seedlings.
I have an interest in determinate (and especially, semi-determinate) plants myself, so always a few to kick around - Jagodka is really sulky! And refusing to be the earliest for me. I swear that plant knows I made fun of it on the internet. Or maybe the combo of "cold and wet and seldom sunny" is the bad thing for this one... Couple other determinate reds - Little Bells and Altajskiy Urozajniy are looking to be stronger and earlier but we'll see what happens when they get planted.
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Old May 7, 2015   #27
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You are not alone Joseph! Tomatoes...bleehhh. I grew tomatoes for the sun-dried market, drying hundreds of pounds each year and never ate them. I won't eat them cooked or raw or in any dish or any way at all... (I should add, as I have said many times on this forum...I NEVER eat vegetables of any kind so no tomatoes is not a surprise!) I lack the "good tasting tomato gene"!
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Old May 7, 2015   #28
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Brokenbar,

I'm curious how you can make recommendations for tomatoes when you don't eat them yourself in any form, and I can only assume that you are going by their easiness to dehydrate. Is that correct?

Linda



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You are not alone Joseph! Tomatoes...bleehhh. I grew tomatoes for the sun-dried market, drying hundreds of pounds each year and never ate them. I won't eat them cooked or raw or in any dish or any way at all... (I should add, as I have said many times on this forum...I NEVER eat vegetables of any kind so no tomatoes is not a surprise!) I lack the "good tasting tomato gene"!
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Old May 7, 2015   #29
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Joseph, I can't help but wonder if you may be a "taster" or a "supertaster." Some people genetically have much more sensitive taste buds than others, so much different that they fall into a different category. In a funny naming scheme, most people are "non-tasters." "Tasters" taste a lot more and Supertasters are often those folks who end up eating french fries their whole life because they can't stand any other foods :-)

Have you ever tried Sungold? I realize it may be unsuitable for market because of the cracking, but it seems almost universally loved in terms of flavor so I am just curious.

I don't particularly like tomatos plain, I like to eat them in or alongside things. Although a caprese salad with homegrown tomatos is amazing. But then again that's alongside things. :-)
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Old May 7, 2015   #30
joseph
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WormGirl: If you caught me absentmindedly eating a tomato in the garden, it would be SunGold. I'd eat more tomatoes if they tasted more like SunGold. When I test, SunGold is the highest brix tomato that I grow. For philosophical reasons, I only grow one plant per year, but I gotta have one plant.

I really enjoy the tastes, smells, and textures of food. But plants containing latex (such as lettuce, figs, or dandelions) don't seem like food to me. I can often smell where people have traveled, who they were with, and what they did while they were together... I definitely don't have the common super-taster trait of only eating a few select foods. If anything, I am the opposite. Really enjoying and/or hating a wide variety of foods. I eat green olives with the pimento peppers stuffed inside them about once a year... Just to remind myself how dreadfully horrid they are, and just in case my sensibilities towards food have changed since last time I tried them.

It takes a long time to switch over from red tomatoes to orange, but I'm working in that direction. It's going to be horrid tasting so many tomatoes, but if I don't taste a lot of really bad ones, how will I ever find those that are somewhat less objectionably, or even tasty?
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