Crosses

I have a lot of friends who have dedicated their lives to making, and then growing out, crosses of various vegetables.  The most common of those is tomatoes, probably because tomatoes are really popular and the results can be really striking considering the variety of colors and appearances tomatoes can have, from nearly jet black, to white, red, purple, green, striped, etc.

Honestly, I am not concerned much at all with a tomatoes appearance as it pertains to being “different”.  My wishes and needs are fairly specific.  Like the Baby Vi squash: It is a really short season, short vined C. Mochata that can be grown in concentrations that no other squash that I know of, can, and still thrive.

Today I planted the 6 plants, out of all the seedlings started, of what is now the 3rd generation of a Lauerer/Terhune cross.  The initial cross was accidental, and “contaminated” a year of my Terhune tomato seed saving.  It was easy to identify the crosses, as they were regular leaf instead of potato leafed, and upon growing them they gave me a round tomato, a bit larger than a golf ball, in great profusion. They tasted just like a Terhune, and I did not realize it was a cross and thought it might have been just a spontaneous mutation.  I saved seed from them, grew them out the next year, and realized what I had.  The subsequent plants (F2 generation) gave me everything from tomato plants “just like” both of the parent plants, along with a lot of other variations.  Many were easy to eliminate due to poor production, weak growth habits, tendencies to split, etc.  One though peaked my interest a bit.

The Terhune is a large tomato, most being well over a pound, and often more than two pounds.  Lauerer is smallish, being the size and shape of a medium chicken egg.  The one I enjoyed the most was a medium sized fruit, that honestly tasted like a combination of both.  It is a thin skinned beefsteak type, and I don’t grow many beefsteaks.

So we will see how they do.  Three of the seedlings are obviously stronger than the others,  three were doing well, while the rest were obviously inferior at least in initial growth habits and I discarded them.  All are regular leafed (some of the weaker ones were potato leafed) as was the plant they were saved from last year.

The last time I worked at doing grow outs of crosses it was a bit of a waste of time, it seemed, to me.  It was a cross of Terhune and Amish Paste, which resulted in a jungle of huge plants that did not produce many tomatoes.  The tomatoes they did produce were gigantic things, which ripened unevenly, split everywhere, and by shape were monstrosities of misshapen globs which split and rotted before other parts of the same tomato were not even ripe.  Due to my space restrictions here at home I cannot afford the space to do proper trials with thousands of plants from each cross, which may prevent me from ever getting a successful stable tomato cross from these parents, but my success with the Baby Vi C. Mochata keeps my hopes up.

And like all the generations previous, worst case scenario and failures still end up in the jars of red sauce on the shelf at the end of the summer.

My other breeding project is a cross that might not have happened yet.  I planted Summertime Gold tomatoes with Czech Bush, and I am hoping that some of the seeds are crosses resulting from those two.  I did not take the time to really learn how to deliberately cross them, and if none of the plants this year are true crosses, maybe I will figure out how to do it by hand.  My hope is that the rugose growth habit which both have, moderates between the dwarfish size of the Czech Bush, and the taller Summertime Gold.  Both have main stems that are like trees, but both will fall over when they set fruits.  Hoping for one that is stronger than either of the parents.  Maybe it is a dream destined to fail, but it would be nice to have a tomato that does not need staking or caging, and produces decent processing tomatoes high enough off of the ground to avoid rot or insect damage.

All of those seedlings are still in flats.  Also going to just go into my yard here.  We will see how they do.

The red popcorn I was given to finish stabilizing should be emerging from the ground this week.  It is in 8 rows out in the garden at the Ness farm.  Feel a good bit of excitement regarding that one.  This is a large planting, and considering how well it was doing before the squirrels found it at the Minnetonka garden, which as a much smaller planting, and that I was able to save a good amount for seed (but almost none for eating) due to the fuzzy tailed rats, which will NOT be an issue at the Ness location.  Except for the drunk driver that managed to get a vehicle into the field and take out my squash plants, trellises, and tomatoes a few years ago, we have not had losses due to vermin there.  Deer walk through there every once in a while, but they have never stuck around to feed.  Not yet anyway.  Hope they don’t start this year.