Vermont Short & Sweet Tomato Project

[Cathy A]

I've started my tomato seedlings for 2025, and several are already up. We had a long, cold winter this year, and weather is still very cool. Snow and ice are gone, but we had a low of 18F the night before last.

I have planted both fresh-eating and sauce/canning tomato varieties for germination.

Fresh: Dwarf Eagle Smiley, MMR x Aztek (F3?) black fruit, Alaska, Clay Family Red, Krainiy Sever, Q-series large orange, Sungold F1, Sungold F4 plum.

Sauce: Utah Heart, Purple Bumble Bee, Principe Borghese.

Disease-resistance testing and crossing potential: Galahad F1

I need to attempt a lot of crosses this year. It almost doesn't matter which ones, because I need the practice, but here are a few that I believe have potential:

DES x Alaska
DES x Krainiy Sever
Alaska x Krainiy Sever
DES x Sungold
Alaska x Sungold
Krainiy Sever x Sungold
Galahad F1 x <anything>

[reed]

I grew Galahad F1 last year and did not like it. It produced poorly and the flavor was not good. Hot Streak F1 was much better, I'm growing the F2 this year and hope to cross it with some of my others.  I've never bothered to identify any specific one in the cocktail of tomato diseases in my garden, but Galahad also did not tolerate them as well as Hot Streak did.

[Cathy A]

It has been an interesting, if busy, year.

The selected MMM x Aztek F3 did very well. It produced a lot of medium-sized, very firm fruit, with the skin of the upper half to 2/3 solid black, and the remainder red/green. It didn't have much flavor as a fresh tomato, but made a really excellent sauce tomato. I will keep breeding the F4 and beyond to use for sauce.

My Sungold plum line seems to have been less plum-like in some (most?) of the plants. I think I'm going to go back to the previous generation of Sungold plum seeds and see if I can stabilize the plum trait. Even the more rounded ones from this line were good fermentation tomatoes.

However, one of the Sungold plum descendants had a few spots on the fruit. I suspect this was an unintentional cross with the MMM x Aztek growing nearby, so I saved those seeds separately and will see what happens in the next generation.

Utah Heart is a great sauce tomato.  Thank you, @reed! I only grew a few plants this year, but will grow much more next year. The only challenge is the low number of seeds per fruit. This is typical for a sauce tomato, but makes seed-saving a little harder.

This was my first year growing Galahad F1. I chose them mainly as a disease-resistance experiment, but we had a drought this year and that meant it was an unusually disease-free year for all my tomato varieties. So while the tomatoes were fine and ended up as sauce, I still don't know if their disease-resistance alleles would be helpful to me.

Principe Borghese was very productive, produced plenty of fruits and seeds, despite the small size of the fruit (large cherry/small saladette). The taste as a fresh tomato was pretty bad, but I grew these for sauce and they worked well for that purpose.

I like the Q-series and will keep growing them, but one of the Q-series plants was unusually sweet and tasty, so I saved its seeds separately.

I couldn't find Orange Banana seeds, so skipped them this year. I was short on space anyway.

Finally, I also discovered a mutant garlic, but I'll post about that in the allium threads.

[Cathy A]

We had a hard winter this year. Only now is the soil starting to become workable again. Lots of snow, lots of extremely cold temperatures.

This year I am expanding my growing of peppers, both sweet and hot, and I may eventually try to do some breeding them.

I'm continuing to grow a wide range of tomato varieties. This year I will grow both flat and upright fuzzy mix, more Utah Heart (which was a great variety last year), Prairie Fire, and a few other interesting ones.

The starts of both peppers and tomatoes are doing very well. I can't wait for last frost, which is about a month away!