Direct Seeded 100 frost free day tomato

[walt]

Good luck on this project.  
My only concern is that number of days is less important then number of degree days.  Not all days are created equal.
You may have to cross your low DTM tomatoes with cold tolerant tomato.  But maybe the very short season varieties have already been selected to cold tolerence. 
But you'll figure it out.

Montana state extension service says direct seeding won't work?  That just means they can't do it.  It doesn't mean you can't do it.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Jagodka ties with Brad as the earliest tomatoes in my garden.

This year's frosty is mostly descended from Sungold crosses, and from a cross between [Hillbilly X Jagodka]. Yup, the seed failed germination testing. It's germinating good enough to share with collaborators, but not for selling. I'll try again under colder germination temperatures. I have been selecting for germination in cold temperatures, but I tested this year at around 80 F.

My growing conditions, dramatic radiant cooling at night, are radically different than those found around Moscow Russia.

[walt]

When I was in Niger, I was doing an experiment growing several kinds of tomatoes, planting all the tomato varieties that had done well there on the first day of the month for a year.  The point of it was that the best tomato for the hot season might not be the best for the cold season, etc.
They hadn't had tomatoes in that area before WW2, and there were no really well adapted varieties.
So I included LA 0722, a pimpinellifolium, in the experiment.
In the middle of the cold season, the LA 0722 came up as quick as usual.  All the named varieties didn't come up until about 2 1/2 weeks later when it warmed up.
So I'll be planting out LA 0722 this spring.  I have germinated seedlings of it now, just showing leaves.  I expect to have new seed by planting time.  I'll plant some, direct seeding, early and see how many DTM they are.  Even if they aren't quick to produce from seed they may be quick growers in cool spring weather.
I hope to have F1 seed of a domestic tomato Ailsa Craig x LA 0722 by then.  If so, I'll plant some seed of that cross too.
I'm also going for direct seeding tomatoes.   We both want good germination in cold soils and quick seedling growth in cool weather.  We both want heat tolerance too, but you say you only get hot summers sometimes.  I can count on long hot summers.

[walt]

Using an F1 hybrid x pimpinellifolium will give segregation in that generation, which means you'll already be starting selection.  Good move.
I have never grown any pimpinellifolium except LA 0722.  It is possible they are all good germinaters in cold soil.  Does anybody here know?

[walt]

I was just reading old issues of the Report of the Tomato Genetics Cooperative and came across this information:

Mapping of earliness (er12.1) gene in tomato
Doganlar, S., Tanksley, S.D. and Mutschler, M.A.
Dept of Plant Breeding, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853

...."The most common form of earliness in tomatoes is early maturity due to an earlier switch from vegetative to
reproductive growth. This type of earliness is generally measured by determining the number of days from
sowing to the appearance of the first ripe fruit (Kemple and Gardner 1992). Unfortunately, this type of earliness is
associated with a decrease in fruit size (Banerjee and Kalloo 1989). A new form of earliness was identified in the
1980s in the variety 'Early Cherry' (M. Mutschler, pers. comm.). This type of early maturity is the result of a
decreased length of time between anthesis and the first ripe fruit."

So there are genes for quicker bloom and a gene (one or more) for less time from bloom to ripe fruit.  I never knew that.  Does anyone here know if this gene is being used?  I would think it would be in many cultivars by now, unless there are problems with smaller fruit or less taste.

Actually smaller fruit or less taste wouldn't be  a deal-breaker would it?  It would depend on how bad it is. 

So in selecting for earliness, I should select for early flowering and also for short number of days from bloom to ripe.  Then see if it is worth it.

[diane]

To find early fruit, I look at Tatiana's list of early tomatoes: tatianastomatobase.com/wiki/All_Early_Tomatoes
and then check each one to see a picture of ripe fruit. She puts the date under the picture of ones she has grown,
for instance, Yaponskiy Karlik - ripe fruit. 2009-06-10.

I wouldn't have ripe fruit quite as soon as Tatiana, as I live near the ocean, and she is inland from me, but I figure it's close enough.

[imgrimmer]

Last season I had a harvest from self sown plants. All of my own landrace. It was kind of a test, I just smashed the fruits and let them be. To my surprise a lot of plants sprouted in spring and half of them had ripe fruits in August.
The winter was very mild only -6°C. But the biggest surprise was that they got ripe fruits.
This winter I did the same with fruits of the best plants.

[gilbert]

Watching this with interest. My climate could use this type of tomato; we can't set out tomato transplants until June, and we have gotten frost as early as September 10th, thought that was unusual. Frost by the 20th of September is not unusual. Some years we get quite a bit of heat, though there is always that radiant cooling at night.

One year in Pennsylvania I direct sowed tomato seeds simply because I didn't know any better at the time; if I remember right I was 7. I actually got some fruits; I can't remember the variety. Our area of Pennsylvania was not good for tomatoes at all; cool, humid, and cloudy.

[templeton]

William,
a couple of ideas or clarifications - without wishing to instigate a landrace war - a landrace by most definitions would be an outcrossing sibling swarm - if your tomatoes don't outcross, then it's probably a grex rather than a landrace - not just a semantic difference, since if your tommies don't naturally cross-pollinate your subsequent generations will constrict toward truebreeding types. I think this is the reasoning behind Joseph's promiscuous pollination project - continual crosspollination. but true breeding types might fit in with your strategy anyway.


If you are going to do some crosses, and frost resistance is one of your aims, you might like to be selective about which one is the mother and which the pollen donor. mitochondrial dna is inherited in the female line, and the mitochondria apparently can have an influence on robustness - or so I've heard. Sorry, no advice to offer on which varieties you might work with . Even better, do reciprocal crosses, and cover all bases.

Again, no experience with this, but have you thought of strategies to assist early emergence of direct seeded stuff - clear plastic on the soil over the seed patch to speed soil warming - not sure how much assistance you want to give the plants. No snow or freezing here so this is just kite flying...

T

[Joseph Lofthouse]

A few years ago I read a research paper that indicates that hybrids tend towards ripening fruit earlier than either parent variety. It's a small effect, perhaps in the neighborhood of 1% to 10%, but in my garden, that might be equivalent to ripening a week earlier on a 70 day tomato.

www.pakbs.org/pjbot/PDFs/41%283%29/PJB41%283%291107.pdf

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Jan 12, 2017 13:51:00 GMT -5 walt said:

I have never grown any pimpinellifolium except LA 0722.  It is possible they are all good germinaters in cold soil.  Does anybody here know?

I'm growing S. pimpinellifolium as part of my frost tolerance trials. The seed came to me from a locally feral population that had been volunteering for about a decade. So it was already self-selected for cold soil germination and frost tolerance before I received the seeds.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Last year I noticed some tomato plants that were flowering on the 4th leaf node. I didn't separate them from the rest of the general population, but I think that doing so might lead to earlier fruit ripening.

My earliest tomatoes start ripening fruit about 35 days after planting 6 week old transplants into the field. So that's about 77 days from seed.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

In my frost tolerance trails one year, I documented dates of flowering, fruit set, and fruit ripening.

I noticed three characteristics that affected the date of fruit ripening.

The time between fruit set and fruit ripening varied between 6 weeks and 9 weeks. It was very typical for larger fruits to take longer to ripen.

Some plants flowered early, but didn't set fruits until some weeks later.

Some plants flowered early, and set fruits early. Combining those traits with fruits ripening quickly produced the earliest ripening in my garden.

Some of the plants flowered late, and took a long time to mature fruit, which made them too long-season for my garden.

A variety that set fruit as soon as the flowers start opening was Jagodka. It is highly attractive to pollinators, so I suspect that the early flowers get pollinated better, and thus set fruit earlier. That's what started me down the path to beautifully promiscuous tomatoes.

I'm constantly on the knife-edge in choosing between earliness and larger fruit size.

[imgrimmer]

Jan 12, 2017 23:13:08 GMT -5 templeton said:

since if your tommies don't naturally cross-pollinate

If you save seeds from the fleshiest fruits there is a higher chance to get crosspollinated seeds.
I started with standard type but there was often some fruits among them like a beef tomato beside normal round fruits on the same plant. I saved seeds mostly from these fruits because I like beefs more then the round ones.
Afterwards I read somewhere that one shouldn`t use them for seed saving because these fleshy fruits come from crumbled flowers often with open stigma. So I did the right thing without knowing what I was doing.
Now after 10 years every generation is different and no plant is like the other.
If you go for these fruits you could probably find more hybrids.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Jan 13, 2017 1:50:14 GMT -5 William said:

Joseph the early flowering fourth node trait sound interesting. 77 days from seed that is a very good number! 35 DTM from transplant. I want seeds!

I'm watching this thread carefully. Making notes about what to send...