Direct Seeded 100 frost free day tomato

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Industry wide, I believe that tomatoes average about a 5% crossing rate... If no selection is done to favor/cull hybrid offspring. And if it takes 8 generations to produce stability, then I would expect that around 40% of tomatoes in a mixed population grex could be considered to be some type of hybrid or segregant. On my farm, natural hybrids tend to be preferentially selected over inbreds, and my natural cross pollination rate is higher than 5%, plus I make hybrids manually. I estimate that about 80% of the seeds in my "landrace" tomato offering this year are recently descended from hybrids. Eventually, I intend for 100% of the landrace tomato seeds that I distribute to be F1 hybrids.

I still include Jagodka, Brad, and Fern in my landrace tomato seeds, because they are the best I found in my trials of conventional tomato varieties. I'll cry in sadness when I finally stop growing them. This coming growing season might be the last year that I grow them. I currently have F1/F2 plants or seeds from each of them crossed to S. habrochaites.


I typically go through stages in naming my varieties:

Open Pollinated: Inbred. Same as a "Variety".
Grex: A mixture of varieties.
Proto-landrace: The grex is becoming cross-pollinated, but isn't yet very well adapted to local conditions.
Landrace: The crop is quite genetically diverse, and highly locally adapted both to the growing conditions and to social norms.

I love importing "foreign" landraces to my garden. Because it's a simply way to trial dozens or hundreds of varieties for those genotypes that can survive my growing conditions.

One thing that I have rarely mentioned about my tomato breeding efforts, is that I am also attempting to undo the double bottleneck that afflicted tomatoes: Once when they were taken from Peru to Mexico, and again when they were taken from Mexico to Europe. So I'm reintroducing diversity to tomatoes, at the same time I am attempting to make the natural cross pollination rate higher, and eventually take it all the way to 100% out-crossing. Along the way, I might discover a whole lot of wonderful traits that fail to satisfy the goals of the promiscuous pollination project, but can be incorporated into other projects.

[reed]

I got a catalog from a company I never heard of and looked it up on the web. They have some very short season varieties if you haven't found them already, here is a link. www.seedsnsuch.com/product/siberian-tomato-seeds/ 

I'm interested in short season not because I have a short season but I think it helps get a nice harvest before the worst of the diseases strike. 

[Earl]

You miss the list I posted for you reed?

I listed about 100 I can share or trade

Determinates any way...I also have (IN) like New Hampshire Surecrop....Wayahead, most of the Canadian Province stuff...Yeager's, etc. etc.

Joseph can confirm I have a good array of short-season stuff

Earl

[walt]

Much of the formally published or professional scientific work with what we are calling landraces,has been done with barley, a largely self-pollinated crop.  Although it has very high crossing rate when grown in mountain areas where warm days and cold nights cause the flowers to open wider.
So in the publications I've read on barley population breeding, they start out hand crossing the parental varieties.  They are grown out in 5 meter squares and seed is harvested and replanted, for many years.  Studies have shown yield increases equal those of pedigree selection and other more intense breeding methods.
After just a few years, the barely in the population starts to have a "look" that is distinct, though a closer look reveals that most detectable genes are still there at a lower frequency than in the origional population.  It turns out that even a very low level of crossing keeps the pot boiling, so to speak.
Yield continues to increase for decades.

So when, or if, do those populations become landraces?  The pros using this method don't use the word, so we can't go by that.  They call them "bulk selected populations".  The term makes their papers longer.  And it prevents dicussions about what is a landrace.

At first, calling our breeding populations grex or proto-landrace seems best.  But it doesn't take a long time for landrace to fit, in my opinion.  And if you give the information of how long and how big a population it is, then we'll know what you are talking about, no matter what words you use.
I said how many.  If you are growing out 5 plants per generation, it will never be a landrace.  It will start out as a grex and end up as an inbred.  The barley populations I referred to included over 1,000 plants per generation.  They keep lots of genetic variation over 50 years and more that some of them have been maintained.  We can't do that with tomatoes.  Especially if you taste test each one.  
There is no magic number that is needed for a landrace, but more is better.
There is no magic number of generations needed to call something a landrace either.  Again, more is better.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Jan 13, 2017 10:29:00 GMT -5 Earl said:

Joseph can confirm I have a good array of short-season stuff

I live in a world where plants don't have names, so I'm really clueless about looking at a seed list and being able to know anything at all about whether or not they would be good for short-season growing.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I save seed from around 300 tomato plants per year, and taste fruits from every plant. It's easy enough to do. I'm mostly saving seed in bulk though, not as sibling groups and not with pedigrees. I suppose that I'm treating them more like grain, and less like tomatoes.

[walt]

Rather than going for more insect pollination, I am using a male sterile gene linked to a brown seed gene. So I will be sorting out the brown seeds and planting them seperate. About 95% of the seedlings from the brown seeds will be male sterile. I can hand pollinate them with little trouble. I can also assume the ocassioal fruit setting on them without my help will be crosses. Brown seed plants that set lots of fruit are male fertile and will be destroyed.
Plants from yellow (normal) seeds will be about 95% male fertile. Those few that don't set several fruit are male sterile and will be destroyed.
I'm retired so I have more time on my hands than Joe. Of course, there are advantages to both of our methods. The important thing is that both will work, as might still other methods.

I taste test too. What's the point of growing lots of tomatoes if not to taste them?

[templeton]

Oops... I though that post might open a can of worms...
T

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

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

Jan 12, 2017 23:43:15 GMT -5 Joseph Lofthouse said:

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 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!

an interesting trait to follow, perhaps even more so if it is crossed with some other trait that seems to have earlier tomatoes like the one someone else i think mentioned in this thread.

[keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.)]

This year i hope to try again to grow both of the galapagos island tomatoes. They really sound interesting because they all pretty much grow in extreme environments. Some in old lava flows, some in dry sandy soil, some in salty sand, some on cliffs, etc. They are all pretty small though. One accession i requested said it had red fruits which is odd since non of the others have that. So curious if that will be the same as "sarah's galapagos island tomato" or if it is a misidentified other species. Hopefully i can learn from my mistakes last year and manage to get all to full size plants this year.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Jagodka and Brad are my earliest saladette tomatoes. At my place, Jagodka grows very well in cold weather and flowers super early. Brad doesn't grow as well in cold weather, but it flowers super early. Both often flower in the greenhouse before I set them out into the field. When I sell tomato plants at the farmer's market, or plant them into the field, they often have fruits set on them already.

I have grown many hundreds of varieties of tomatoes to find these two that thrive in my garden (when set out as 6 week old transplants). Sometimes I have grown other tomatoes that people claim are earlier, but at my place they end up being up to 4 to 6 weeks later. My growing conditions are unique, and those two varieties really thrive here. Results might vary in other areas. As an example of what I'm dealing with, 4th of July tomato ripens around mid-August in my garden, but Jagodka starts ripening in early July.

I used to grow a different un-named variety that was earlier but it wasn't very productive, and was highly frost sensitive so I stopped growing it. It might still be present in the landrace population. Sometimes a cherry tomato ripens earlier, but I'm not much interested in growing cherry tomatoes.

Current tomato doesn't capture my imagination for use in a breeding project. I expect that I'll continue to trial it in the cold/frost tolerance tests, and watch for any natural hybrids that might show up. My population has been volunteering for a decade in a local garden, so it might have something to contribute to a direct-seeded project.

This year's landrace tomato population is heavily descended from Jagodka. William: I put about 1000 landrace seeds into the box I'm putting together for you. That aughta give you plenty of opportunities to find something that works as direct seeded.

I didn't focus as much on making crosses with Brad as with Jagodka, because Brad is indeterminate which tend not to do as well for me as determinates. But I did get crosses made. Brad X Neandermato hasn't yet produced F2 seeds, but it might if I can keep it alive overwinter. I made another hybrid between Brad and yellow pear. Something interesting might come out of the F2 seeds that are currently ready to harvest.

I may have complex crosses in which Brad, Jagodka, Fern, Black Prince, and NoID red are the female grandparents, Neandermato is the male grandparent, and the mother is a three way cross with lots of wild genes. These are specifically part of the promiscuous pollination project, but many of the ancestors came out of the frost/cold tolerance trials, so I have high hopes for this population. One of the grandparents of the three-way cross was descended from Sungold, which is often the earliest tomato in my garden (but a cherry, so I don't count it as a real tomato or keep track of ripening dates).

Embryo rescue strikes me as super easy. Open the fruits about 31 to 35 days after pollination, and plant the seeds into sterile growing media.

Frost that kills some percentage of the plants is common in my garden. For example, last year, my last spring frost was on July 5th, or was that the first fall frost?

[reed]

Jan 14, 2017 21:55:47 GMT -5 William said:

  I think Reed mentioned he is interested for disease avoidance reasons even though longer season. It would be good to have cooperators with disease problems working on trying to add in more disease resistance. I haven't got a lot of tomato disease though the first late blight epidemic I've heard of went through my valley not many years ago damaging the seed potato industry.

Disease, especially what I assume is late blight is a huge problem in my area.  I read somewhere that tomatoes are not self pollinating in that they need some physical stimuli to shake or vibrate the flowers. I'm not sure I believe that at least that they need anything more than an occasional breeze. It used to be that you could plant twenty tomatoes and have all you wanted to can for winter and eat fresh till frost and nobody went out and vibrated flowers.  I'm starting to think that heat might also be a factor in tomatoes not producing like they used to. 

Anyway whether it's heat or disease killing production I think shorter season might be helpful in the primary goal of having plenty to can for winter without having to devote most of the garden to tomatoes. As far as flavor goes I'm happy with my current collection largely descended from Joseph's and Toomanyiron's seeds and last year we got plenty to can before the worst of the blight ravaged then vines. I think early to mid August is when we did or canning from plants set out in early May. 

I'v been going through the garden books and web sites and am thinking of trying controlled crossing of some new varieties. I'v never done that before but it seems pretty straight forward. My list of possible purchases is:
Defiant  VFFEbLb Det - 70 days
Rugged Boy  VFFStLb  Det - 72 days
Heatmaster  VFFATSt Det - 75 days (heat tolerant)
Phoenix  VFFA Det - 72 days (heat tolerant)
Park's Season Starter - Det - 60 days

None of these are as short season as might be needed for your project but they will work me and if anything good comes out as far as disease resistance maybe it can be adapted to even shorter season later on. 

There is a root stock variety called Supernatural that sounds interesting. It's advertised as being resistant to about every disease. I have no interest in grafting but am curious about what it might grow into if left to do so. Haven't been able to find anything on it as far as development or pedigree but wonder if it might have some wild species in it. 

I'll plant these in a crowded patch to dehybridize and sample for flavor and also a different crowded patch where I try to not let any develop except for those pollinated by my favorite tasting and open flower ones. If any turn out to be actually disease resistant and taste good I'll save seeds from the crossed ones to become my breeding lines. 

Never occurred to me to grow tomatoes to maturity in the window but if I get my order in soon I easily have time to do some crossing and dehybridizing in time for planting in May. Don't know what the woman will say about that but she is tolerating the sweet potatoes so maybe I can get by with it. 

[rangardener]

Reed said: "I read somewhere that tomatoes are not self pollinating in that they need some physical stimuli to shake or vibrate the flowers. I'm not sure I believe that at least that they need anything more than an occasional breeze. It used to be that you could plant twenty tomatoes and have all you wanted to can for winter and eat fresh till frost and nobody went out and vibrated flowers."

---

Buzz pollination?    :-)

www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZrTndD1H10

[reed]

I'v seen bumblebees do that, I'v seen them do that to tomatoes but never at a time when it would matter, only when little else is available. Something else accounts for an apparent decrease in fruit set over the years around here. Maybe some other pollinator that isn't around anymore, who knows. For now though I'm blaming it on disease and or heat. I figure I'll try the vibrating toothbrush method in my breeding experiments and just to see what happens, I'll try it in the patch too. Little tomatoes still set plenty of fruit, pretty much every flower grows one but bigger tomatoes don't.

[imgrimmer]

Jan 25, 2017 23:34:14 GMT -5 William said:

Here are some of the shortest season tomatoes I've found in my searches:

Kibits 31-65 DTM estimated depending on which source you believe!

Sweet Cherriette 35 DTM

Anmore Dewdrop 47 DTM estimated

42 Days tomato, 42 DTM but some sources say not quite that fast

Kalinka 46 DTM

Forest Fire 45-50 DTM

impressive how short seasoned tomatoes can be. I`ll try these too.

I will do direct seeding again this year. Some are already in the ground and some on the ground.