F1s for the People!

[Tim DH]

OK.. I finally tested negative this morning, and seem to have regained a fair proportion of brain function so: Here is my new bright idea. (Hinted at on the '2022 Tomato Growouts and breeding experiments ideas' thread) An   F1s for the People!   Project.

The advantages of F1s, particularly in vigour, are well documented. What I don’t like about them is ceding control over my seeds, plants and ultimately food, to anyone else.

SO: How about creating a suite of F1s in which the parental lines are easily sourced Open Pollinated cultivars? Then, instead of keeping the parental lines secret, intentionally publicising the recipe!

I’ve decided to make a start this season. I have a selection of Early Red tomatoes. They are all decent cultivars, but hopefully at least one pairing of them will be sufficiently genetically different to produce a bit of hybrid vigour and extra interest.  Some of them are Potato Leaf. I intend to use PL cultivars as mothers and the Regular Leaf as fathers. I’ve never done any manual crossing before, but it should be possible to conduct a seedling trial before the end of the year (sorting on leaf type) to determine which of the fruits contained F1s. Then next year, having already selected the F1s, a small trial should be enough to reveal what the F1s actually do. Weigh the crop, publish the results, all done & dusted in eighteen months! Hopefully launching a useful Public F1 in the process!!

Tim DH

[William S.]

I am enjoying my 2022 abundance of homemade F1 tomatoes. Their vigour is obvious! Even though in many cases I don't know who the father is exactly.

[Andrew Barney]

OK.. I finally tested negative this morning, and seem to have regained a fair proportion of brain function so: Here is my new bright idea. (Hinted at on the '2022 Tomato Growouts and breeding experiments ideas' thread) An   F1s for the People!   Project.

The advantages of F1s, particularly in vigour, are well documented. What I don’t like about them is ceding control over my seeds, plants and ultimately food, to anyone else.

SO: How about creating a suite of F1s in which the parental lines are easily sourced Open Pollinated cultivars? Then, instead of keeping the parental lines secret, intentionally publicising the recipe!

Then next year, having already selected the F1s, a small trial should be enough to reveal what the F1s actually do. Weigh the crop, publish the results, all done & dusted in eighteen months! Hopefully launching a useful Public F1 in the process!!

Tim DH

I'm still recovering from COVID myself.

But I really like this idea! I can't say if I will necessarily participate in this project as I'm a bit lazy and don't know that I would want to put in the effort of recreating my own F1 hybrids year after year, but I think it is a very worthwhile project! I fully support this idea.

I'm planning an interesting cross this year. I have a small dwarf orange cherry tomato I like that has green shoulders. I am going to grow it out this year and see if it is stable. If it is, perhaps I can pledge it. I am calling it "orange rocket" for now. I am thinking I will try to cross it with 'Uluru Ochre' since it is also an orange with what appears to be green shoulders. Theoretically the F1 should still be a very tasty orange with green shoulders.

[Adrian]

In my f2 of canestrino di lucca x andine cornue i will may found a andine cornue exerted as canestrino di lucca is exsert and probably with gf for increase the taste.

In orange i have pineaple tomato and i think she is exerted.
What can given yellow x orange tomato?

I can even selected a san marzano lungo exserted on the cross san marzano x costoluto.


The question is what want people?
Tolerant at disease, bad climate? Taste?, Uniform? Color? Productivity? Earliness?Form?Vigor?

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I make a public domain F1 hybrid sweet corn. The mother is Astronomy Domine, the father is either Who Gets Kissed, Ambrosia, or a similar homozygous sugary enhanced corn. The offspring germinate very reliably in cold spring soil, due to the seed coat of the old fashioned sweet corn, and they are sweeter due the pollen donor.

Eventually, creating F1 hybrid tomatoes from the promiscuous project will be super easy.

F1 hybrid brassicas are easy to create because they are self-sterile. Plant exactly one plant of each line in isolation together, and all the seeds produced will be an F1 hybrid between them.

Spinach hybrids would be super easy because they grow either as male plants or female plants.

Squash hybrids are easy to make manually.

[William S.]

Apparently creating F1 hybrid tomatoes from potato leaf tomatoes with an extremely exserted style and stigma is already decently easy at least it was for me in 2021! It was harder back in 2017 I don't think I had as much exsertion then on the potato leafs. I also wonder if my bees are getting better at pollinating tomatoes after six straight years of growing them.

I think though that better exsertion on potato leafs might make them more useful for crossing with the wild SI species in pursuit of an SI strain. Finding the hybrids should be a little easier! Though the wild hybrids I found this year were initially smaller seedlings with rounder cotyledons. I thought I had some habrochaites crosses with MMS which is potato leaved, but they have grown up to look like Solanum arcanum which is possible if they are hybrids and also possible if some arcanum seed somehow stayed in the strainer from a prior batch say and contaminated the MMS crossing block. The Promiscuous project x Habrochaites LA2329 plants though act like hybrids- they smell like LA2329 but seem pretty vigorous at least in part. There is one plant from Big Hill that I think is a hybrid but maybe not with LA2329. It was smaller and had rounded cotyledons, but it looks pretty ordinary now. I will plant it with the crossing block again though. A potato leaf that was SI would produce 100% regular leaf offspring when crossed with a homozygous regular leaf SI.

Though interestingly when just a good number of the offspring are regular leaf as with my exserted potato leaves grown in crossing blocks, the regular leaf seedlings are much more vigorous and when left in a mixed pot outcompete the potato leaf seedlings. High levels of heterozygosity would be necessary to maintain that, but in an imperfect facultative outcrossing system with high heterozygosity we might expect that hybrids would be very dominant in a dense planting. Or maybe I am just rationalizing my ridiculously dense tomato plantings! Also, SI individuals in a mixed SI/SC population should outcompete SC individuals for the same reason. If conditions are right for SI. Though my garden has effectively been a mixed SI/SC population since 2017 and it hasn't been the case that SI has outcompeted SC. Perhaps because F1 interspecies hybrids are few and far between and not necessarily the most competitive as young seedlings perhaps simply due to their smaller than domestic seed size.

Getting towards the idea of what makes a good hybrid. Do all tomato hybrids have similar vigor or do some combinations work much better than others?

One potentially good combination in late blight afflicted areas could be hybridizing with a known to be homozygous for PH2 or PH3 or both. Using say Iron Lady (homozygous for PH2 and PH3) or Edit: Galahad (Homozygous for PH3) or some such as the pollen donor with a potato leaf as the mother. You could also use a dehybridized or dehybridizing version and save yourself the cost of hybrid seed entirely by creating your own versions.

Though you could also grow out a few more generations of your own hybrid from the initial cross and probably come up with a potato leaf tomato with some resistance and then use that tomato as your new mother perhaps with a different resistant father to bring back up your level of hybrid vigor.

[Roland]

Who have experience with F1 Cherokee Carbon?
its a cross between Cherokee purple x Carbon. Did u make a comparison between these 3 tomatoes?

And is there a difference between Cherokee purple x Carbon and Carbon x Cherokee purple?

[Steph S]

This is a great project, Tim. 
Manual crossing is easier than you think.  Just make at least a few repeats of your cross, and you're pretty certain at least one will take.  There are great videos available that show how to chose a flower at the right stage of development for emasculation, so you don't get any selfing.  I tend to err on the early side, and that just means you have to repeat apply the pollen for a couple of days until you see that it sticks.  The pistil develops a knob on the top that is sticky when mature, and it'll sweep a clean line through your collected pollen - then you know you're done.   Still good to do more than one, because sometimes they abort.
I assume you'll be growing the two parents side by side with your F1, so yield can be compared - great plan!
I have often grown a parent for earliness reference, but have always been a little slack about measuring the yield from one plant or another.

I was kind of excited about the prospect of heterosis in F1's when I started breeding, but - without actual measurements mind you - I didn't see any notable increase in vigor or  yield in most of my crosses, and I found that disappointing. 
Then my focus shifted to crosses with determinates and indets, which muddies the waters, and my space got gobbled up with F2's and later, so the F1's mostly got small pots and minimal space for the couple of fruit for seeds.

There was one OPxOP cross that had noticeable vigor and yield in the F1 the year I grew it - that is Black Early X Indian Stripe, aka BEISt. 
I still have seeds of all three if you or anyone wants to try it out in a different environment, and confirm if there really is heterosis and higher yield and vigor in the F1.  Tasty and early too, the year I grew it.  For a big fruit that is.

[Steph S]

Interesting research on hybrids/heterosis turned up in news yesterday.  This would be worth a read of the paper, for anyone planning to make F1s.

https://phys.org/news/2020-03-genetic-diversity-yield-hybrid-crop.html

"However, successful future hybrid varieties were only achieved when the initial breeding material had high levels of genetic diversity and dominant genes."

[Adrian]

I think recessives genes are also usefull that the dominant genes.
My tomato is potato leaf x wispy leaf and she had more  large leaf that all tomato with regular leaf that i have see.

I think recessives genes are usefull for improve the action of the dominants genes.

[Tim DH]

Hi Guys,
   Thanks for all your positive feedback.

Andrew: I don’t think ‘recreating my own F1 hybrids year after year ‘ will be a problem. I have read that tomato seed can be 50% viable after ten years. If I’m responsible for the creation/storage of the seed, then I’d have much more control than I have with ‘bought’ F1s AND more seed to play with. .. (This year one of my commercial packets of (expensive) seed had a germination rate around 25%! I’ve seeded twice so the first fail wasn’t a freak result.) I would envisage recreating a successful/desirable F1 every eight years, unless a friend had done it recently!

Adrian: I agree ‘The question is what want people? ‘ but in this first instance, its actually what I want! All the parents are red for starters. I’ll be scoring for Earliness, Productivity and Taste. (I won’t be doing any Determinate*Determinate crosses, Determinate being recessive.)

William: You are right, there are a whole load of ways this could go. In Year One, to avoid getting swamped, I’m going to keep it simple. … Early Red Indeterminates. My parents are Bloody ButcherPL, Imur Prior BetaPL, StupicePL, LatahRL and MoskvichRL. … IPB & Latah are both Determinate, so that leaves me with five PL/RL combinations. I suspect some of these cultivars are not very genetically distinct. However, hopefully, at least one of the five combinations will produce a measurable result.

Steph: Yes, I’m intending to make repeat crosses, and test seed from each fruit separately. I’m also intending to trial the resultant F1s against a parent. …. If I get that far, I’m hoping to rope in a few local greenhouse owning friends in the trial!

Tim DH

[Andrew Barney]

Hi Guys,
   Thanks for all your positive feedback.

Andrew: I don’t think ‘recreating my own F1 hybrids year after year ‘ will be a problem. I have read that tomato seed can be 50% viable after ten years. If I’m responsible for the creation/storage of the seed, then I’d have much more control than I have with ‘bought’ F1s AND more seed to play with. .. (This year one of my commercial packets of (expensive) seed had a germination rate around 25%! I’ve seeded twice so the first fail wasn’t a freak result.) I would envisage recreating a successful/desirable F1 every eight years, unless a friend had done it recently!

That's a good point! I hadn't thought about that. I suppose you could do a lot of crosses one season and save the seed for use year after year.  Hmm.. maybe that is something I could and would be willing to do for myself as well. Assuming I like the F1 that is.

I like this project. I can envision this really taking off and revolutionizing the open seed movement. I think this project could have far reaching results and implications that could change the whole industry.

I like the idea that you might be able to offer a custom F1 hybrid for your local friends and greenhouses in your area and climate. That would be very cool! Regionally adapted custom open source hybrids!

[Adrian]

Stupice orBloody ButcherPL,   look like good ideas as male parents for a f1: they did a lot of flowers! They are very productive and early! I will tasted them this year!
They did so much flowers that i can try again easily if i miss my cross.
Latah look tasty!

[Tim DH]

We have our first Public F1!

I was watching the dwarf tomato project seminar

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G3izfjQscZo

At minute 34:30 Craig says ‘This is an aside’ and goes off on a tangent. He describes an F1 between Cherokee Purple and Lillian’s Yellow. The accompanying slide says ‘Best tasting of the season’. He says ‘Anybody who wants to ….. cross those two varieties   ….. I’m not going to market it.’
So there you have it! A recommendation from Craig LeHoullier for an F1 which is not commercially available but publicly creatable. So long as you use the regular leaf version of Cherokee Purple as the pollen parent, then the seedling check I’ve outlined before will confirm that you do have the F1. Until Craig gives it a name I’ll refer to it as ‘Craig’s Gift’!!

It’s a bit miffing to be pipped so early on in a project, but what better recommendation could you ask for? Does anyone fancy trialling ‘Craig’s Gift’, like Steph suggested, to see if it has any other benefits than just TASTE.

[Andrew Barney]

Some of us are not fond of growing heirloom tomatoes anymore because of poor growth and productivity. Cherokee purple is actually my most hated heirloom as I've tried growing it multiple years and never got anything worthwhile.

Perhaps a better alternative would be to use the newer dwarf varieties to replace those parents in a close approximation. A guy on youtube claims that "Rosella Purple" comes close to Cherokee Purple in looks and flavor.

Perhaps one of the dwarf yellow varieties can replace Lillian’s Yellow as well.

I might be willing to taste the F1 of "Craig's Gift", but I don't think i would want to make the F1 myself. But It might be interesting to try creating dwarf version knockoff of "Craig's Gift". Perhaps they could be tasted side by side.