Wasn't thrilled with the new varieties in 2016

Let's review. 

Ananas Noire. (Black Pineapple)
I had a hard time telling when it was ripe.  Then the plant started dying before I got more than a couple of fruit.

Basinga
Supposed to be a pale white, but it was just an ordinary orangy-yellow once it ripened.  Not remarkable at all.

Brandywine
Ok, but I prefer Mortgage Lifter, which is bigger and has great flavor.

Long Tom
These were prone to rot and/or other unsightly lesions.  I picked very few.

Roman Candle
Waxy yellow appearance - and taste.  Too bad this was the only one to survive past July in my backyard this year. Also prone to end rot.

And, I also had a couple Roma plants because I got free seeds from one of my suppliers. There's a reason it's a common variety - I got lots of consistent fruit and they sauce well.

The smallest F2

One of the interesting phenomena of intercrosses is in regards to continuous, quantitative traits such as fruit size.   Here's F2 #28, with an avg. weight of about 15 grams - well below that of the smaller parent, Indigo Rose.

So - what we can conclude from this F2 plant is that some contribution of genes from the much larger parent (Cherokee Purple) must have contributed genetic material that further reduced fruit size in the context of the smaller parent's genes.  How is this possible?

There are a few known tomato genes with large effects on size, and it is likely that Cherokee Purple is homozygous for the "big" alleles at these genes. However,  there are undoubtedly many more genes that have smaller effects on size too.  Cherokee Purple probably has some alleles that act to reduce fruit size slightly, but in the context of the Cherokee Purple genome these are overwhelmed by the action of the other loci that have much stronger effect to promote bigness.

In F2 28, I speculate that this plant has inherited "small" alleles from CP for loci that in IR are represented by "big" alleles. It is easier to understand this if one remembers that the ancestral fruit size was very small - just a few grams. In this view, IR certainly has some alleles that promote size way beyond the ancestral state.  In fact almost no tomatoes eaten routinely today are as small as the ancestral species/subspecies.  Exceptions are "currant" varieties, such as one of our family favorites, Hawaiian Currant. Here's an example:

More to try

Uluru ochre

More thoughts for 2017

Someone at the farmers' market suggested that I start a second set of plants a month behind the first set, so there will be more fruit continuing past the first batch.   Worth a try.  

When all my plants started to die off in early August I was worried that fungal load was just too much  this year.  Maybe plants that started later would be delayed in succumbing to these sorts of problems.

Remember too that in July-Aug, weeds really start to explode.  If there are plants that continue to produce into late August it will be necessary to keep on top of that.  :)

By then end of August the garden was completely overgrown (though I completely gave up on weeding by August, since fruit production was almost done anyway, what's the point?).  Many of the plants were dead and no good fruit were left out of ~90 plants.   And despite all my weed mats , and previous mulching and trimming it looked like more weeds than anything else. What a change from back in June when everything was so neat and orderly.  

Protip:  don't foolishly walk through tall weeds in August while wearing shorts.  I clearly got poison ivy or the equivalent.   Didn't expect that from weeds in my garden but live and learn.

Some runner-up F2s

These are not homozygous for gf.  But they have a 2/3 chance of being heterozygous; if so 1/4 of F3s will be gf/gf.   Otherwise they are big, or at least medium-big, and have good purpling - worth a try at the F3 stage.  In addition to these, note #s 20 and 49 which produced at least 1 rather large fruit, approaching 1 lb; and #28 which was a prolific cherry!

Examples of favorite F2s from 2016

These seemed to combine at least some purpling, flavor, size and homozygosity for gf.  Shown here: 8,24,46,55.   not shown but maybe: 15.

Examples of the green flesh gene (from Cherokee Purple)

Here's two F2 fruit showing the trait.  Fruit slices on the left are from an F2 that is homozygous recessive for the gf mutation.  The ones on the right are from a different plant with a wild-type color phenotype, the typical "tomato red" color.   Otherwise these particular F2s happened to be very similar in size and shape.

Ideas for tomatoes to try next year

Sun Gold, and  Lilian's Yellow Heirloom .  Suggested by Craig LeHoullier on The Splendid Table 9/9/16.  This is the guy who named Cherokee Purple.   These are his top three recommended varieties; furthermore he says Lilian's Yellow is the best tasting large tomato.  Considering he knows Cherokee Purple better than anyone, that is saying a lot.

F2 fruit weight distribution

Post-harvest

Welp, the big season is done.  After the big harvest in July, we were on vacation, then by the time I got back to the garden in early August I only could pick about half a pail of tomatoes.   By then, most of the plants had started dying - looks like late blight? Basically, drying up with stems turning brown from the bottom up.  It looks like it's not just my plants, but the same thing is happening to most of the plants in the community garden.  This may be because we just had a pretty constant, wet early summer and it supported the fungal load.   Also, there is definitely more fruit damage - spots, rotting, end rot, etc.

Although there's less fruit falling on the ground then years past, there's still a fair amount.  So I could still do more to prune suckers early on in the season I think; but it will definitely mean increasing labor a lot.

From the July harvesting I had about 11 quarts of mainly pureed F2 fruit and a similar amount of heirloom fruit (CP, ML, Romas mostly.)  So I made 2 batches of marinara sauce.  Unfortunately I burned the F2 sauce while cooking it down. :(  Still canned 5 quarts but it's probably lousy.   Then I made sauce from the heirlooms and it went better, 5 & 1/2 quarts that came out pretty good.  So it goes.     Already thinking about next year...!

Oh yeah, I bought a Victoria food press to process the tomatoes... A great purchase!   I learned a few things while using it too.  First, it's designed to process chunks of tomatoes - not already-pureed tomatoes.  It does a great job of removing skins and seeds in short order from fresh chunks i.e. quartered tomatoes.  But if you put puree into it, it tends to gum up the screen pretty quickly.  Probably because I food-processed the puree too much so the skin bits, etc were very tiny and clogged the screen instead of moving out through the screw mechanisms.  That meant it took a really long time cranking on the handle to get the juice out.   But it was still nice, because the resulting strained juice was really free of skin and seeds.  Totally worth it.

F2 examples

From mid-July.

Parents: Cherokee purple (CP) and Indigo Rose (IR); seen at left.

F1 example fruit = below parents on left.

Numbers =  From individual F2 plants in 2016.

The big July 2016 updates

7/18/16:   It is the peak of the tomato season.  I wait all year for this.  So: this is by far the most plants I’ve ever had, and it’s a lot of fruit…

After a bout of illness, I felt well enough on July 11 to go to the garden and harvest. First, I cleaned up with the weed-eater – the garden is clean and mostly in good shape.   Which is a big accomplishment given the number of plants (~90) and compared to previous years.  Next, I collected samples of F2 fruit in paper bags labeled with plant numbers.  (More on phenotypes later.) Then, I picked the remainder of ripe F2 fruit en masse.  That resulted in 2 baskets of F2 fruit, and finally I picked a basket or so of heirlooms.

Then, on Sat. July 16 – only 5 days later – I went back and picked what may be the biggest harvest I’ve ever had.  1 basket of more F2s; 1 basket full of orange slicers and green zebras – with some really huge OS’s; 1 basket full of Cherokee Purple; and another basket of “reds” – mostly Mortgage Lifters, Romas, and a few odd SS and Long Toms.  The latter are not very productive, as they seemed pretty susceptible to end rot.  So in all, that was 4 full baskets.  Probably on the order of 40 pounds. 

I managed to do a lot of sauce prep/processing early in the week and this past weekend.   I actually bothered to skin most of these except for the first batch of “F2 puree” from 2 baskets’ worth.  Then, they were pureed and frozen in bags.  Looks like I got about 10 freezer bags each with 2-3 quarts of puree.  These are separated by type:  pure F2s, “mostly CP”, and “mostly ML+Romas”.  I also froze a bag of F2 #28 cherry-size tomatoes – because I picked about 1-2 quarts of these but every darn last one was split wide open.  Though this looked like a nice cherry tomato, if it always splits like this it will be a real loser.   But, the splitting might just be due to the wet weather we’ve had – true thunderstorms almost every week without fail.

F2 examples: gf

From left to right:  CP, CP, two F2#4, two F2#8.   #8 is gf/gf. (Orange slicer and pieces of another f2 at bottom.)

A couple cross attempts, etc

On June 21 I tried a FL x IR cross in the backyard using pollen from IR flowers that I brought from comm garden and kept alive with the cut truss in a cup of water.  That worked well, and after a couple of days sitting there the IR pollen came off very nicely.   At the comm garden I also tried a GX x CP cross.

So I left the F2#55 seeds too long in the water glass - about 8 days - and they had started to germinate.   Whoops.  So I chucked 'em.  Need to soak no longer than 3-5 days I think.

By June 24 I am noticing the second HC plant in backyard may be have some leaf death, perhaps the wilt is on this one too.  It sort of stalled out at 5 ft tall and usually HC grows like crazy.

Flamme coming in nicely.

Backyard wilting...

Well, now 3 plants in backyard are defitnitely wilting:  of course Basinga, but a HC and a FL.  Fortunately I planted 2 each of the latter 2 and their sister plant is healthy in each case. ??  These are probably fungal wilts.

Tiger stripes on a CP

Randomly noticed.

Phenotypes

Some F2s

Hey this one had nipples. ??  

So far a few F2s have quite evident purpling but too early to tell if any match up to IR.  Several have very light color.  I am glad I regrew parents and the F1. Ir:

This image nicely shows 3 stages of IR fruit and how it takes time for color to develop.  The red spot is reflection from my phone camera red-eye flash, I think!

Here is the F1.  Notice how hard it is to see any anthocyanin yet.  The green blush is about as much as one can appreciate.

6/16/16

Community garden looking good.  I spent  30 min just "stuffing" branches into twine, then put up more twine , recorded some phenotype and took pics.  And I picked the first F2s from 55 and 50.  Deer munched the #55!!  But it was mostly ok and we ate the rest - very good taste.  The purple was not super strong but it has at least a bit more color than CP. I think.  Kept seeds from this #55. The smaller one next to it, with decent purple and just barely ripe, is a #50.

First of the season

A delicious BC!

First color

On HC of course.   June 7!

Basinga : June 1 vs June 10; wilt damage

I pruned a few low branches between these pics.

Aack - wilt.

The Basinga plant is badly wilting.   A few days ago I pruned some yellowing branches mainly from the HC plants but also BA.  However the BA has more rapidly wilting and yellowing today and the wiliting leaves - prior to yellowing in otherwise normal looking branches and now higher up the plant - is a sign (I think) of a fungus in the plant vascular system.  The plant has also slowed growth and has topped out at 4 ft while the others around it are all taller.    The cause is not early blight because it does not have bullseye spots, and the wilting is preceding some slight spotting and yellowing - so this might be verticillium wilt.   If so it's bad, because there's not much to do.  Note the photo in the last post which shows the BA fruit (still looking good today) which are close to the ground, and the leaves around them are healthy green.   Today, the leaves are yellow and wilty.

However the BC next to it looks unaffected and is huge - 6.5 ft tall, setting fruit and growing.

Backyard pics 6/6/16

Nice fruit on Ananas Noire, Flamme, Basinga.   View of from left: HC-HC-BC-BA.   BC > 6 ft.

x
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June 5

Did a bunch more twining today, weeding, and some petal counting.   Petal # = surrogate for carpel # phenotype; based on initial counts, IR has ~ 6 petals/flower, CP has ~8 and the F1 is close to CP, and the F2s express a range.  I definitely noticed some megablooms on some F2s, and these are generally the first bloom on a truss, as has been reported by various folks on the interwebs.  So I am going to discard these outliers from any averages.  These tend to have >10 petals, e.g. 13 or 14+.     I also smushed about a dozen potato beetle larvae.   At home, I have a plant that is already 6 ft high.  In the home garden I had some branches at the bottom of HC plants turning yellow and dying; this is either something like septoria spot, or, a semi-determinate normal dying off of the lowest branches.  To be safe I cut all these branches and threw them away.    It has been rainy lately and I've had the sprinklers going and that may contribute to it.  Seems like a minimal problem tho.

June 2

F2 #40 (I think) = strong purple like IR. Maybe has gf phenotype.  #55 only modest purplish,  but a nice looking beefsteak.

Getting there

5/29/16: A brief stop at the garden to add some more twine and pull a few weeds.   I'm getting more effiicient at the Florida Weave though it's clear that one has to be aggressive about both that and pruning suckers - I still have a few plants that are flopping around a bit.    But overall it's not bad.  Plants are mostly about 2-3 ft. high, lots of flowers, fruit set well underway.  Next weekend I plan to do some major twining, good weeding (enough for a skipped weekend).

Here's F2 55 again too...

Backyard plants

Are growing exceptionally well, already about 5 ft high and it's not even June.  I added a fourth (or so) twine row.  Not sure why they are booming so fast this year - perhaps because I spread some of my homemade compost all over before the season began?  Carefully pruning suckers probably is also helping them go up up up. !

To try next year?

Been reading about a variety, or varieties, called Indian Stripe or Indian Zebra.  These seem extremely similar to Cherokee Purple in color and flavor, with slightly smaller fruit, but are reported to be more productive plants.  Several commenters in an old gardening thread stated they preferred these to CP.

Update: more purple, more stakes.

Today I put in about a dozen 8 ft. spruce stakes in between the T-posts.   These will help keep the twine tight between the T-posts and give more support to plants - at least that's the idea.  It's a cheap alternative to the T posts at a buck each.  However I did have to saw the ends so they go in the ground easier, and I have to put nails in them to fix the twine.  So we'll see if in the end it was worth it. I still have another dozen to put in.  Also: picked a few more suckers, and zapped a few more potato beetle egg clusters & larvae.  No adults found this time.  And finally, here's some F2 fruit.  #55 now has more purple; beefsteaky; and looks pretty green too - this may be a good one.  Also in order below are fruit from #40 and #50.  Definite segregation for shape and probably the dark green.  I did not record petal numbers today but I did notice one F2 with only 5-petal flowers.

Sucker MC's should call me Sire

Today: a cool weather Saturday.  Things are looking good in the community garden.  I removed suckers from all the plants and put up more twine so at least one level is up for all plants.  Except an F2 that is all on its lonesome.    I counted all surviving F2s:  N=57, and noted positions.  Finally I did a bit of weeding and removed a couple more potato beetles, larva and eggs.  Not very many.  F2 #55 still has the purply fruit, growing nicely.   However the purplish color is not as evident now after some more growth, and I'm no longer confident it will be strongly purple. Dark green shoulders.

 Many flowers on the first row of F2s and on some heirlooms.   In my backyard, the plants are really booming - ahead of the community garden - and almost needing a 3rd level of twine!

Fruit status

Home garden:  Fruit's on the vine, on BA, HC, RC, FL.  BC and AN flowering too.  

Sucker punching

Or rather, sucker pruning, or simply sucker plucking.  This year I am trying something new, which is specifically removing suckers from the plants.  As many other websites describe, suckers are shoots that emerge between a side branch and the main stem, and they will form into a continuously growing new stem unless removed.   This will direct more plant energy into new stem and leaf growth instead of flowering, fruit production and upward growth of the main stem. So removing suckers should maintain a more upright habit, and less bushy and sprawling.  Taller, "leaner" plants = fruit are more elevated = less disease and loss.

So far so good. Straw mulch time.

Today I picked up 2 bales of wheat straw for mulching.  First things first: at the garden another tarp had partly come out, but with not as bad consequences as last time.   So I pinned down all the tarps rather more thoroughly than at the outset.  Hopefully there they will stay.  

All the heirlooms are doing fine.   The F2 count is down to 57;  like a dope I accidentally broke one at the base else it would be 58.   Most F2s are looking OK, though mainly they are slightly less vigorous than the heirlooms.  Fortunately we got good rains over the last week.

An exciting find on an F2 - a growing fruit that already has very distinct purpling! , and also, has a wide/slightly flattened and ribbed phenotype that almost certainly reflects Cherokee Purple genes!



I also found about 5 or 6 potato beetles, and several of their egg clusters under leaves.  I removed and terminate all I could find.  Sadly one little F2 seemed to have been stripped clean by the beetles.

Finally I spread the straw all around the plant bases and put up a bit more twine.  Feeling good about how things are going so far.

Nota bene

It is clear that the plants in 3" square pots - the F2s - are less vigorous than the plants in 4" round pots - the heirlooms - that were sowed even after the F2s were.   I think the F2s were getting rootbound.

On schedule

For perspective:  This year I am about a whole month ahead of where I was this time last year.  I didn't plant in the community garden till mid-May, and was still trying to re-sow more seeds in late May.   Given that I've already got flowering plants in the ground I am pleased.

A post about posts

Today I put in all the metal posts.  I'm using 6 ft. metal T-posts .  They are VERY substantial - 8 lbs each.  Easy to put in with my hand post driver.  I got about 24 put in in about an hour.  These posts are pretty good.   The only slight thing I would improve on them would be to add small upturned hooks like other fence posts usually have, which would assist with twining.   As they are, I have to physically wrap the twine around the post, so I can't affix the twine box to my belt which would have speeded up things.   I also went ahead and put up just a bit of twine in some rows where some plants already needed some help.

One thing went wrong with the tarp - we didn't put in enough fasteners, so some of them blew up partly.  This resulted in the squashing of about 6 F2 plants.  Bummer.  Still got N=58 left.  One of the broken ones even already had a tiny fruit!

Oh yeah, I hoed a buncha weeds too - so these are still under control for now....MUST get hay mulched down this next weekend!!!

Several plants have flowers already.

The F2s are doing mostly OK, not exploding yet but it's still early.  The ones planted 2 weeks ago are well established.  The F2s and heirlooms planted last weekend are about the same but at least all alive except the ones noted above..  A few looked pretty thirsty but the water was shut off since they were putting in irrigation lines, soI could not help them out. They will have to struggle by today.

Some of the F2s have really strikingly dark purple leaves.  Pics show these and a GZ non-purple heirloom for comparison.