Thursday, August 6, 2015

Is this a stamenless plant ??

So in my little backyard plot this year, I planted only 8 tomatoes.   Some of these were really small stragglers that died.  But, surviving to the flower stage were one "CP", one "OS" and one F1 IRxCP.  Fair enough.

The F1 is bearing fruit.   The CP and OS have flowers - a bit late since they were planted late, but they are there.  So finally some of the CP flowers were maturing, and I was interested to take a look and see if fruit were coming, or if I could try some crosses for the heck of it.   Then when I started looking at the flowers they seemed weird.  One had a very long pistil emerging and the rest of the flower looked kinda short.   I peeled back the sepals and there was just nothing that looked like petals or stamens.  There were small, lobe-like whitish structure where these should be.   Another bud on the same branch was slightly younger but had an emerging pistil. After peeling it seems to be the same as the other one.

I tried to take a photo as night was falling - not perfect but I think shows what I saw.  I had peeled away about half of the sepals to expose the gonadal parts.  Note that the pistil had already extended far beyond the sepals by about 3-4 mm.   The stamens and anthers were not really apparent at all, except for the small lobed structures I alluded to above.


Anyway, I figured these buds were worth crossing attempts!  A stamenless flower cannot produce male pollen; selfing is not possible, so it's a good opportunity for crossbreeding.  Unfortunately the F1 IRxCP plant that I had in the backyard had no flowers left.  Too bad, that would have allowed a cool backcross to the CPs.   Instead I had to settle for using OS flowers to donate pollen.  I brushed some peeled OS stamens onto the two CP pistils.  Therefore these are "CP female x OS male" attempted crosses; that is, Cherokee Purple x "Orange Slicer" which itself is an F1 hybrid.

If it's not a stamenless mutant, then the petals and stamens must develop much later than the pistils in this CP variety.    Over the next few weeks it will become more clear if this is really "stamenless" or not.

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