Green Zebra Breeding

[Tom Wagner]

Green Zebra is one of my most often used male parents. As I try to use the various tools required to post here, I may finally learn how to post pictures of my crosses and segregations. My computer has been acting up for the last few months and had to take the thing in to wipe it clean. Just trying to reload things I needed helped me understand better the fool things.

I put together a Power Point presentation on crossing tomatoes today. I used Picasa 2 and bought a USB 2.0 Flash Drive to carry the info with me. Until today, I harbored no idea what that was. I had to have this for my talks at the Seed Savers Convention this weekend. I used photos of a hybrid of Black Brandywine to a Green Zebra and crossed the pollen to a pure Black Brandywine. The resulting seed will be 3/4 Black Brandywine and this backcrossed seed will be valuable to select for Black Brandywines with many new traits.

This is a photo I took of a Green Zebra yesterday. Maybe I will get to join the rest of society posting pictures. And I will be doing my first solo Power Point.

Tom Wagner, Breeder of the Green Zebra

1.jpg

[feldon30]

Technology can be equally great and frustrating. Picasa does make handling photos a bit easier.

Thanks for posting the photo and I hope your presentation goes off without a hitch!

[Tom Wagner]

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This is an F-1 plant of Black Brandywine X Green Zebra. The ID system I use is evident: 23 of 3-23-97. The hybrid vigor is outstanding, but I don't know if anybody would be happy with a tomato vine that looks like this.

I am collecting pollen from this hybrid to use in crosses with other hybrids and OP's.

Tom Wagner

[pbud]

Nice picture, Tom. Why is Green Zebra one of your most often used male parents?
Paul

[feldon30]

The stems look downright non-tomato!

[Tom Wagner]

Why is Green Zebra one of your most often used male parents?

1. Tang
2 Stripes
3. Size of fruit
4. yoo-bik-wi-tuhs It is everywhere in the heirloom collections
5. Cross-over friendly
6 The wish to have Green Zebras in every type of tomato possible.
7. One of my heritage tomatoes and the inheritors (descendants) will carry gravitas.
8. Pretty tomato, photogenic, easily recognized
9. Wish to rid it of weakness of BER
10. High chlorophyll. We need more in our diet.

[Grub]

Thanks for posting Tom,

I enjoyed the pics very much and look forward to following a lot more of your works via visual means as well as words.

Best wishes for the presentation and do keep us posted.

Cheers. Gs

[Patrina_Pepperina]

Thanks for posting pics Tom, and I hope there'll be heaps more to come!

Patrina

[johno]

Tom, I am curious about something. You say you like to use Green Zebra as a male parent. What difference does it make if the parent is the male or female in the resulting offspring?

[feldon30]

Originally Posted by johno

Tom, I am curious about something. You say you like to use Green Zebra as a male parent. What difference does it make if the parent is the male or female in the resulting offspring?

Might want to check a similar topic here about why male vs. female is important:
http://www.tomatoville.com/showthread.php?t=5887

It's a little confusing for me.

[johno]

Thanks feldon30.

Nope, didn't help. I was looking for the finer points...

[Patrina_Pepperina]

If I recall correctly, there are some traits in the plant itself in the cytoplasm or something (it might have been in mitochondria, not sure) that can only go forward on the female plant, and so that is another reason why I always chose dwarfs as the female in the crosses I did for the Dwarf Project.

However, it doesn't really make sense to me since the info ultimately has to be stored in the seed with the other genetic material, otherwise it wouldn't make a difference?

PP

[svalli]

Originally Posted by Tom Wagner

1. Tang
2 Stripes
3. Size of fruit
4. yoo-bik-wi-tuhs It is everywhere in the heirloom collections
5. Cross-over friendly
6 The wish to have Green Zebras in every type of tomato possible.
7. One of my heritage tomatoes and the inheritors (descendants) will carry gravitas.
8. Pretty tomato, photogenic, easily recognized
9. Wish to rid it of weakness of BER
10. High chlorophyll. We need more in our diet.

Green Zebra is one of my favorite salad tomatoes and I used it also in my green habanero ketchup, which surprised many dinner quests. I would really like to try tomatoes related to Green Zebra. I have had not really bad trouble with BER in GZ, but now when you have mentioned it, I realized that they have been among the ones having more problems with it.

Why do you say that we need to eat more chlorophyll?

The lycopene in red tomatoes is healthy, so tomatoes with both chlorophyll and lycopene would be really good eating?

[Little_Rhody]

Hi everyone,

Last fall I bought a gourmet selection of tomatoes at BJ's. Three of the mix were cherry size and looked like very small black zebras. I saved seed and planted them this season. all 5 plants are the same as the ones I saved seed from. I think green zebra is a parent. I'm wondering Tom, if you bred this one? I'm going to try to post photos of some next week. The plants appear to determinate and also have the green zebra tang.

[cosmicgardener]

What are you hoping to achieve with the Zebra x Black Brandywine? I'm growing both this season but hadn't considered them as a cross. Any particular traits? I think my addiction is revving up!

Cosmic