Tomato Forum Dwarf Project

If you love growing tomatoes and have some spare room in your garden, please consider taking part in the project!

Patrina

Linda

My name is Rob and I'm very interested in participating in this project. I posted in the Tomato Growing Forum and have sent an email to a mate in Canberra, John4, (Smarszie lol), to see if he would be interested also. If, by chance, he has his hands full with growing what he has and can't join in, would anyone like to "partner" up ? I'm in California and have plenty of space to dedicate to the F1's by themselves. Hope to hear from Patrina and All.

Rob

I'm hoping that John will be able to participate, and hopefully you two will be able to pair up. It's gonna be heaps of fun! I'm just a bit concerned about getting enough Aussies and Kiwis on board, so I'm holding my breath at present ;-)

Patrina (PP, who can't get the old ID to show up in Garden Web anymore, boo hoo)

PP

Mantis, it's the F2s where you begin to see the segregation of the gene combinations set up by the initial cross. The more you grow, the bigger the range of variation you'll see. PP and Craig are after 'tree' types (dwarves with rugose foliage basically). You only need to grow enough so that a couple show up and hopefully these will have some interesting fruit. How many is enough? I don't know the genetics so I can't answer that.
As an example, if there is only one gene involved in the 'tree' type, and there is no gene linkage or anything, then you have at best a 75% chance of seeing a 'tree' (gene dominant and fully expressed) and at worst a 25% chance (gene recessive) in the F2. If there are two genes, these numbers change to 56.25% and 6.25% respectively.
I would strongly suggest that you grow each of the original parents as a check each year. Among other things, this would be a great help in identifying 'tree' types very early on so that non-trees could be culled at the seedling stage (second or third set of true leaves). This would save a lot of space!
You could try sowing successively (10 followed by 10 etc) and cull the non-trees. Even someone with only enough space for 5 plants could sow 100 or so seeds this way, reasonably spaced in seed trays so that they have enough room to get to the second or third true leaf stage. Well, you could if you had a long enough growing season!
Just some ideas.

Mantis, to give you an example from my growout this season, I germinated 10 F2 seeds of my cross of Russian Red x Cuor di Bue, and 3 seedlings had rugose "tree" type foliage. That's pretty close to 25%. I gave all the rest away, but for this project you'd have to ditch them, unless you wanted to grow out some yourself as another personal project. So, my recommendation would be to try to grow 10+ plants showing the tree type foliage, but it's up to the individual participants. If you could only grow 5, then maybe you could consider growing F2s for 2 seasons in a row. And maybe your NH partner could grow some F2s while he's growing out any selections you made for him to grow of the next generation, the F3s.

I'm intending to grow F2s for the first two downunder seasons just so that more can be sampled. The F2s and F3s are the most important in terms of large samplings, and then I think it narrows down.

Craig (Kionga) has joined the SHers, yippee! He's having login problems too - I told him that it's happening to everyone and many folks have re-registered.

PP

Craig (the North Carolina one!)

Craig, I found a pic of Tinzaly F1 and I thought I'd post it in the Tomato Forum Dwarf Project thread with a pic of the fruit on what was supposed to be Orange Strawberry. The fruit shapes are similar for these two, and I think Orange Strawberry is an F1 too. It should make "Bashful" a very interesting growout! Poor ol' "Doc" is in trouble tho - more info in the other thread shortly.

Patrina