Paste Tomatoes Project

[Natasha Flue]

The season is marching along. I got all my tomatoes in the ground in two days, although they don't have irrigation yet. I did make a mistake starting some varieties and they were knocked back pretty good. They are still alive and should pull through.

I've got two breeding rows, one where the plants were randomly planted with Joseph's promiscuously pollinating tomatoes so I can just cross plants to the ones next to them and combine them all into a mass of genes and seeds, and one where I planted them out in sections, so I can make controlled crosses that I know the parents. Now I wait for blossoms.... and get my irrigation set up.

[Natasha Flue]

I had first blossoms this weekend when I saw the plants. They are looking great. I didn't cross these first blossoms because I want to do a whole bunch of crosses at once, so I'm waiting another two weeks. I'll do my first crosses then, and probably twice more after that in case something goes wrong.

[Natasha Flue]

Did my first crosses this weekend! I've never actually crossed tomatoes before so it was interesting to figure out how to gently do it. I was fascinated to see the differences in stigma, stile and stamens across even the commercial paste varieties. Some had large stiles and some had very tiny and thin ones. Some had stamens that opened up at the top.

First crosses, all I did was cross one with the plant next to it since the plants are all mixed together in one row. I'll do some crosses between specific varieties in a different row next time I can and mark those down.

The plants have small fruit on them already except for the promiscuous pollinators. I suspect it is because I don't get enough insect interest in them due to where they are. I did see some flies on a few flowers. I'll make sure to cross them up more next time.

As far as cultural practices go, I've been using a cultivating tractor to weed them and this past time I used the hilling disks to give them hills to keep them upright a little longer. I won't be trellising because it's a lot of work for plants that just overgrow them and flop on the ground anyway. The dwarf plants are very interesting so far, being much much more compact than the other varieties. They are probably six inches shorter as well.

[Natasha Flue]

I've been making crosses every time I visit my tomatoes. Things are going pretty well despite the sudden hot dry weather and my lack of irrigation. I never did get around to setting up the system and it's too late now to run drip tape. I've got tomatoes of all sizes and some of my initial crosses have taken. The Plum blight resistant tomatoes have finally caught up so they are being crossed in. I'm tracking which crosses I use them for.

[Natasha Flue]

Seed harvest is in. I collected the crossed fruit, which ended up only being a few, combined them and fermented. I also collected a variety of fruit within my breeding section that I'll make into a landrace, but there was one variety I skipped due to it's problems with disease and relatively uninteresting fruit. I'm going to be adding more varieties in next year and hopefully have more crossing success. That section also contained Joseph's promiscuously pollinated tomatoes, which I was a little afraid wouldn't set any fruit. They were all placed far from each other in the row but were crossed with something as they all bore fruit. I saw three different types of fruit from the plants, one that looked like a little heirloom style partially ripe, one like a little cherry tomato partially ripe and one that looked like TPS berries, where they were green and dropped from the plant. Picture attached.

The promiscuously pollinated seem to hold up against the large amount of late blight we have in the area this year. They held their leaves better than most other varieties and have less lesions. They were a paler green than I expected but I suspect that is just natural variation.

[nathanp]

I have Plum Regal in F4 or 5, pretty sure it is homozygous for Ph 2 and 3

Plum Regal is homozygous for Ph 3 only.  It does not have Ph 2

[William S.]

Habrochaites are a paler green, the foliage. A few of my segregates are deeper green. You had three plants? I have around 30 to 40 plants I would guess and most are green berry types. 3 are kinda colored, and 2 are almost domestic type fruits.

[Natasha Flue]

Habrochaites are a paler green, the foliage. A few of my segregates are deeper green. You had three plants? I have around 30 to 40 plants I would guess and most are green berry types. 3 are kinda colored, and 2 are almost domestic type fruits.

I had around 10 plants and most were the green berry type. I think I had two colored type and one domestic type, these didn't drop their fruit so I'm pulling as many of those seeds as I can and having less of the green berry type in the mix. I haven't grown out all of the original seed so if I want to bring those genetics back in, I can. They were spread out between about 70 other plants in a row, hopefully to cross them with the plants close to them. They were the pale color plants I think, but I didn't look close. They were still doing decently despite the late blight pressure in the area (and no spraying on my part) although I'll do a better evaluation next time I check the field out. But most of my tomatoes are dead, mostly dead or the fruit is covered in lesions at this point.

I did finally get a harvest of the Plum Perfect and uhhh, they are rock hard. Like, I wasn't expecting them to be that bad but really like a green tomato in texture when I pressed on them. I was also unimpressed with the meat to seed ratio because there was a ton of seeds and gel in there for a paste tomato.

[nathanp]

I did finally get a harvest of the Plum Perfect and uhhh, they are rock hard. Like, I wasn't expecting them to be that bad but really like a green tomato in texture when I pressed on them. I was also unimpressed with the meat to seed ratio because there was a ton of seeds and gel in there for a paste tomato.

Yes, that is my experience as well.  It may have late blight resistance, but not much else that I could observe to recommend it.