Vermont Short & Sweet Tomato Project

[AndrewB]

Are days to maturity normally calculated from transplant or from sprouts? I suspect it may be from transplant. Based on those numbers I suspect this may end up closer to an 80 or 90 DTM tomato from sprouting for you. I'll be curious what it ends up being. What do you think?

[Cathy A]

I agree that DTM is measured from transplanting out, not from seeding.

I'm not going to guess what the DTM of a variety I have never grown before might be. We'll see. Historically, August and early September have been tomato season here. Anything earlier than that is a bonus.

I love fresh tomatoes, but my primary goal this year is to get enough for tomato sauce and salsa. Last year I bought 30 lbs of tomatoes from a local grower, but I would rather grow them myself!

[Steph S]

I've always made my earliness measurements from germination date to pea sized set.
DTM may be helpful for people who buy plants and don't know their age.
For spring transplants in my greenhouse here, first set close to 100-110 days is considered early. Bearing in mind that temperature is a variable, you don't gain 'earliness' in days to set by planting too early, unless the weather decides to stay warm.  Suboptimal temperature just slows the process down.
Sometimes I've gotten early sets by putting out an already flowering plant.  This is fine for bragging rights but didn't actually advance the main crop harvest, so was not really worth the extra effort of tending early plants in less ideal conditions. 
YMMV entirely Kathy, we have really cold late spring here. 

I've had fruit set on a micro tomato grown indoors at 88 days from germination, and I've heard similar figures for a few other extra early tomatoes.  Most of the ultra early tomatoes I've grown, which set in the greenhouse in the cold of spring, were not worth eating.  Maybe they would be better for planting later.

[Cathy A]

We had a late season frosty night on Wednesday, with low of 25F (-4C). All 9 plants I had planted outside earlier in the month survived under a folded, quadruple-thickness row cover.

For the first frost of May, around 30F (-1C), I had tomato cages in place and draped the row cover over them. This did not work well, as there was too much potential for cold air to sneak underneath through a gap. I lost one Sub Arctic Plenty and a couple other plants had the upper part of the plant damaged.

After removing the cages and laying the row cover directly on the plants, I did not lose any more.

[Cathy A]

On May 19, I transplanted most of the remaining tomatoes outside. There is no frost in the 5-day forecast, and our official last frost date is May 23.

The Olena Ukrainian were seeded late, and aren't quite large enough to go out. The Wildling Panamorous volunteers I received from William are being hardened off, and they will be transplanted in a day or two.

With a wide range of varieties being tested, I will be watching closely to see what happens next.

[Cathy A]

The first tomato fruit has formed. A Siberian Red transplanted out 5/5 has a fingernail-sized green fruit on it.

This plant survived multiple near-freezing nights under a row cover, the lowest about 25F.

I am impressed with this plant and will definitely be saving seeds from it.

[Cathy A]

Krainy Sever has four small green fruits. The overall plant leaves and stems look healthier than the other super-early varieties (Siberian, Glacier), though there is a little bit of leaf failure starting to show.

Wildling Panamorous are growing quickly after a slightly late start, and leaves are heathy green everywhere with no visible insect damage. However, none of the Wildling have flowers forming yet.

I am hoping to cross wildling pollen with Krainy Sever, Glacier, Siberian Red, and Sweet Cherriette to try for a generation of hybrids with wildling health and resistance, and earlier fruit.

I will also save seed separately from the earliest wildling plants to fruit.

Q-series seeds have become available from EFN again and were ordered for next year, together with Neandermato.

[Cathy A]

Sub Arctic now has one green fruit resting on the dirt, and one additional flower.

The flower looks surprisingly large for a domestic. I'll try to photograph it tomorrow when there is more light.

Unfortunately Sub Arctic has long stems that lay horizontally before turning upward near the end. It's not dwarf or determinant, and would need good support to produce much.

I have grown Sub Arctic before, and I seem to recall the same growth habit.

Big Hill has recently flowered. The flower appears a little larger than most domestics, though not as large as I expect Wildling to be.

[Cathy A]

Here are some images of the Sub Arctic Plenty flowers.

It may be that this variety has larger flowers than other inbred heirlooms. Or this particular plant could have accidentally crossed; it was purchased seed, and I don't know where it was grown.

Or I could just be misjudging the size of the flower. It's certainly not as large as the pictures of seen of the Panamorous flowers. (No wildling flowers in my yard yet.)

Without further ado:

[Cathy A]

We are getting large amounts of rain, which is causing rapid growth across the whole garden, including tomatoes, onions, peas, and other plants.

This is what the primary bed looks like for the Vermont Short & Sweet Project:



This is a second bed with less diversity:


This is the Wildling Panamorous bed. There are two Dwarf Eagle Smiley at upper left, two Alaska at lower left, and the right-hand 2/3 of the bed is Wildling:


You can see that the wildling have finally begun to generate large flowers. They were transplanted somewhat later than the first bed and second beds, so some of the lateness is not genetic.

[Cathy A]

Glacier and Krainy Sever fruits are ripening on 7/9. Krainy Sever has been incredibly productive. I wish I had more than one plant! Will definitely be saving as much seed as possible from these fruit.

Krainy Sever:


Glacier:
 

[Cathy A]

I picked the first ripe Krainy Sever fruit today. It is one inch in diameter, spherical, firm, and red.


Unfortunately, it is mostly flesh inside, with little gel and few seeds. This would be good for making sauce, but it's not good at all when you are trying to build up a seed stock for breeding.


Total seeds and gel from this fruit:
 

My husband's taste test reports "Tastes like a tomato." In other words, typical red lycopene tomato, tastes normal, no fruity flavors and no off notes.

I was very excited about this variety initially because it is fairly early, a fairly self-supporting dwarf, and has six fruits (one ripe) at a time when other, larger plants have no fruit or a few green fruit.

I'll definitely grow it out again next year, but it's going to be harder to get enough seeds if this fruit is typical.

I think it has strong crossing potential with Sungold F1 to try to get the dwarfing and high productivity of the Krainy Sever with the beta orange and higher seeds per fruit of the Sungold. If I can master the hand pollination process for tomatoes, repeated backcrossing to the original Krainy Sever seems like the way to go.

[William Schlegel]

That proposed Krainiy Sever x Sungold F1 would be an interesting cross! It would probably be necessary to stabilize such a cross for an F2 to get dwarf offspring back between back crosses. Sungold seems to offer a nice gene pool for earliness and fruity flavor.

For the first time in the years I have had Krainiy Sever in my collection, I was initially impressed by it in 2017, I have a cross or so hanging from a plant of it. I managed to plant in the greenhouse, so it is well protected from potential predators. It may be simply Krainiy Sever x (MMR non-dwarf F2) which is not that exciting of a cross but would carry yellow and or bicolor genes and possibly blue skin. If by chance the MMR non-dwarf plant has a dwarf gene hiding in recession it could spit out 50% dwarfs in the F1 if it is the same type of dwarf gene.

[Diane Whitehead]

I have a packet of seeds of Krainiy Sever bought in 2015 from Tatiana.
The photo shows one cut open with lots of gel and seeds.

Here is some of the information on the package:  They were certainly the prettiest tomato plants in our 2014 garden, and one of the first to ripen in early July. When fruits start to ripen, they turn golden orange first, and then turn red over the next 2 - 3 days, so the the plant looks some beautiful!  Fruits are small and somewhat flattened, 1 - 3 oz. Outstanding sweet flavor, very impressive for such an early tomato.

Russian commercial variety.  Introduced to North America by Andrey Baranovski of Minsk, Belaris in 2007. Unfortunately the name got translated into English and it is also known in North America as Extreme North.

[William Schlegel]

Oh, I should perhaps add that because I liked Krainy Sever well I saved a lot of seed in 2017 from not a large number of plants and so its seed production can be quite good.