The definition of an amateur is someone who does a thing for love, while a professional is someone who does a thing for money. Neither definition though makes any distinction regarding competence at a thing.
I am an amateur gardener/farmer who has done some accidental breeding of tomatoes. As much as I know about gardening and growing things, I do it for my love of it and my family. The tomato breeding, up until now, has been chance crosses of various things, and while I have had fun dabbling in it and growing crosses out over successive generations, I do not have the love, dedication, or professional touch to it that Mark Mccaslin of Frogsleap Farm has in regards to tomatoes.
He had invited me a few weeks ago to come down and see his growing operation here in Minnesota, which is within my traveling limits, just south of Prior Lake. Raised beds in a creek bottom, dark loam soil, amended with their own horse detritus gives him beautiful growing conditions, vigorous plants, and with the varied genetic parentage, no two plants alike out of the 300 he has growing this year at this location (yeah, he has a couple spread across the country).
Although I had seen photos of some of his work in tomato breeding, I had never had the chance to learn just how they go about purposely crossing plants, nor had I seen work done with the UV reactive skins where they turn a dark blue/black when exposed to direct sun.
This gives a good example of how fruits on the inside and outside of the plant have very different color expressions even before ripening.
And it really is completely dependent on the UV rays. Here is a fruit where I removed the last vestiges of the plant stem and flower showing how the shade of that shielded the skin and prevented darker color change.
He saves seeds individually from every plant, using plastic sandwich bags to ferment seeds, and labels the bags identifying the exact plant the seeds are from. There are groups of 4-8 plants, each plant in the group with the same parents, but every plant also an individual differing from sibling plants in everything from growth type, skin coloration, fruit shape, texture, sweetness, density, the list goes on and on.
This particular type (if it can be called that) was the sweetest, most intensely flavored tomato I have ever eaten. Being an F1 of an F2 cross and completely unstable, all it will be in the future is a parent to yet more generations hoping to express similar genes in some future stable variety. Between this garden, another in PA, and a contract grower in CA, Mark can grow out several generations in a single year, moving his projects along much faster than my playing around. His descriptions of genetic expressions, crossing and back-crossing to enforce and reinforce genetic propensity of one part or another of the fruit and plant left me a bit dizzy, and way out of my league. However, I got to eat tomatoes. Dozens. And then dozens more. For hours we tasted one after another until I finally had to get out of the sun, so we sat in the shade, had some IPAs, and ate more tomatoes.
Baby Vi ate tomatoes, pears, and chased the dog until she found the horses, then she played with them ( I have no photos of that because I was back at the table drinking beer and eating tomatoes) until she finally fell asleep, exhausted, in the car.
Baby Vi and the kids also fed the horses windfall pears. We ate them fresh from the tree as well. Wish I knew what type they were (Mark didn’t remember). Small, firm, sweet. If I had not been so busy trying tomatoes I would have had more than one of them.
The hospitality of Mark and his wife, combined with such a profusion of incredible tastes (no spitters, but definitely some favorites) made for a wonderful afternoon and a change of scenery for us while spending time with people who love tomatoes even more than we do. (Which I had not really thought possible, but no use denying it when it is there and true.)
You can find Mark and his tomatoes on facebook at:
https://www.facebook.com/pages/Frogsleap-Farm/252266034621
There are also a lot of good photos of tomatoes he has created, or contributed genetic material to at:
https://awhaley.com/supernaturals
