Post by oxbowfarm on May 22, 2013 9:52:44 GMT -5
A couple years ago I read Tom Wagner's essay on tomato hybridization and tomato breeding, there was a great discussion of the article at the SSE forum.. I became very interested in the concept of creating our own "farm exclusive" tomato hybrids, especially since none of the modern hybrids were exactly what we wanted for our mobile hoop-houses. It seemed like a fun endeavor to experiment in this direction. After some false starts in 2011 we managed to make an enormous number of successful tomato crosses in 2012. We now have the F1 offspring growing on and can report a few interesting initial findings.
Many heirloom tomato fanatics will state that there is no advantage to growing hybrid tomatoes vs heirloom tomatoes, that tomatoes do not show hybrid vigor. I believe this is incorrect.
Thus far, I can say definitively that hybrid tomatoes will be significantly earlier than either parent variety. One of the parent varieties we used in crossings last year was Bloody Butcher (many thanks to Wendy MontaƱez for the BB seed!!!). BB is a potato leaf first early tomato very similar to Stupice, Matina, Kimberly, and several other very similar early varieties. One of which is almost certainly one of the parents of Early Girl F1.
For my super early tomato planting I included Bloody Butcher and two of last years crosses that incorporated Bloody Butcher as a parent. Gregori's Altai X BB and Neve's Azorean Red X BB. Both hybrids are in bloom, while BB is still a day or so away from opening.
In the above pic you can see Bloody Butcher on the right and a Gregori'sXBloody Butcher F1 on the left. The BB flowers are just getting close to opening up. Here's a close-up of the flower truss on the F1 plant.
The NARXBB F1 plants are also flowering, but are a bit behind the GAXBB. I attribute that to the fact that NAR is a bit later in maturity compared to Gregori's Altai.
So far this has been a fascinating process. I'm very interested in seeing what will happen next. We are also planning on doing a few other crosses with BB this year to get some other early F1's to trial. I'm also thinking about trying to do some BB crosses in the aim of breeding a better early parent variety than BB. It has a few qualities that I don't care for, the main ones being inconsistent fruit shape and tiny, fragile, over-abundant flowers. I'd love an early, perfectly round, potato leaf variety with moderate number of flowers per truss with nice rugged stigmas. Bloody Butcher has these huge branched trusses with lots of little fragile flowers on it. It would be nice to use the potato leaf parent as the mother plant, but I was unable to do this last year because the BB flowers were so fragile and hard to work with.
Many heirloom tomato fanatics will state that there is no advantage to growing hybrid tomatoes vs heirloom tomatoes, that tomatoes do not show hybrid vigor. I believe this is incorrect.
Thus far, I can say definitively that hybrid tomatoes will be significantly earlier than either parent variety. One of the parent varieties we used in crossings last year was Bloody Butcher (many thanks to Wendy MontaƱez for the BB seed!!!). BB is a potato leaf first early tomato very similar to Stupice, Matina, Kimberly, and several other very similar early varieties. One of which is almost certainly one of the parents of Early Girl F1.
For my super early tomato planting I included Bloody Butcher and two of last years crosses that incorporated Bloody Butcher as a parent. Gregori's Altai X BB and Neve's Azorean Red X BB. Both hybrids are in bloom, while BB is still a day or so away from opening.
In the above pic you can see Bloody Butcher on the right and a Gregori'sXBloody Butcher F1 on the left. The BB flowers are just getting close to opening up. Here's a close-up of the flower truss on the F1 plant.
The NARXBB F1 plants are also flowering, but are a bit behind the GAXBB. I attribute that to the fact that NAR is a bit later in maturity compared to Gregori's Altai.
So far this has been a fascinating process. I'm very interested in seeing what will happen next. We are also planning on doing a few other crosses with BB this year to get some other early F1's to trial. I'm also thinking about trying to do some BB crosses in the aim of breeding a better early parent variety than BB. It has a few qualities that I don't care for, the main ones being inconsistent fruit shape and tiny, fragile, over-abundant flowers. I'd love an early, perfectly round, potato leaf variety with moderate number of flowers per truss with nice rugged stigmas. Bloody Butcher has these huge branched trusses with lots of little fragile flowers on it. It would be nice to use the potato leaf parent as the mother plant, but I was unable to do this last year because the BB flowers were so fragile and hard to work with.