This year one of my goals was to master tomato cross-pollination. Having a dozen different healthy plants in containers on my back patio is a big help.
I started emasculating flowers on June 3, but by about June 10 I was wondering if I was focusing on flower buds that were too immature; turns out I was. Here's a good link to a guide from UC Davis on tomato cross-pollinating that talks about this subject in detail:
https://tgrc.ucdavis.edu/Guidelines_Emasculating_and_Pollinating_Tomatoes.pdf
Starting around June 10, I focused on flowers that are probably at just the right stage, which is about 1 day before they really open. This seems to be working to some extent. I also am giving crossed flowers serial numbers. By June 16, I could tell that at least a couple of these attempted crosses were growing fruit. Seems like most of the ones I tried before June 10 obviously failed, or no evidence of success, at any rate. As of June 19 I am beyond serial number 25 in my crosses.
Why do more crosses? Well why not? It would be interesting to bring the stripe gene into my IRxCP lines, so I am crossing Pink Berkeley Tie Die to 46A2 and 55A7. Also of interest, would be to cross Flamme or KB to RT, GDZ or even ZPT to make a yellow fruit with interesting shape.
Finally I am crossing RT to GDZ to test if they fail to complement. This is tricky since if they fail to complement I expect the "lumpy" phenotype to be similar to either parent, which is probably identical to self-fertilization. Since this could happen by accident I am hoping to get several crossed fruits so I can validate independently generated F1s (i.e., seeds from different individual fruits). That would be more convincing than following seeds from a single fruit.
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