What should I expect?
 

It looks like my Anna Russians are an F2 cross. 3 out of 16 seeds came up PL, the others had wispy RL leaves. Odds are that the daddy plant was a pink beefsteak PL, so I should expect plants with either pink beefsteaks or the occasional heart [3:1]. Right?


But what if daddy was a gold PL? How do those color genes act in crosses?


I have 2 RL and 3PL planted, and the waiting is..., well, you know.

[URL]http://tbn0.google.com/images?q=tbn:qJ-Y18vitbpPAM:http://farm1.static.flickr.com/200/503814253_2c6653971c.jpg%3Fv%3D0[/URL]

The picture above shows the leaf type of an Anna Russian. Wispy leaves are associated with either oxheart shaped fruits or super long fruits. I will have to study the connection of those two leaf form/fruit shapes to see what chromosome and linkage is involved.

[quote]It looks like my Anna Russians are an F2 cross. 3 out of 16 seeds came up PL, the others had wispy RL leaves. Odds are that the daddy plant was a pink beefsteak PL, so I should expect plants with either pink beefsteaks or the occasional heart [3:1]. Right?
[/quote]First of all, you must mean that your seedlings are out of a F-1 crossed plant. Besides, saying the term-F-2 cross- means something else entirely than what you are thinking.
I don't see any information about what the F-1 plant looked like. Did you grow the parent plant or did you receive seed of it? If you received seed I cannot help much on the mystery.

Next thing, the recombination of 3 out of 16 having potato leaf types is well within expectation of the F-2 family segregation. If the leaves of the regular leaf plants and the leaves of the potato leaf plants are at least partly or completely wispy leaved...the odds are good for some expression of the oxheart shape. Partly wispy leaves should have blunt oxheart shapes; in other words, they should have a slightly tapered or pointy bud end. If the plants show no wispy characters, odd are for some other shape regardless of the unknown parent. You should expect some pink fruits also but in what percentage, I have no idea.
[quote] But what if daddy was a gold PL? How do those color genes act in crosses?[/quote]It depends on the type of gold genes, there are two kinds; one that is dominant and one that is recessive. Still, I don't know what your mother plant had. If you had the mother plant last year and the grandmother the year before that, one could ascertain what potential potato leaf plants were in your garden two years ago. That information was not provided.
[quote]
I have 2 RL and 3PL planted, and the waiting is..., well, you know.[/quote]If you can't wait until ripening, then show pictures of the plants and or the developing fruits. That you have 5 plants is good because a description of all five will give me hints of the unknown pollen parent, but not within any certainty. If you had only one potato leaf variety two years ago, that would give me something to go on. Two potato leaf types in the garden would make it more difficult, but with five plants, the odds are good that I could rule in or rule out the significance of a potential potato leaf parent.

In any event I would be most interested in a potato leaf, wispy foliage plant regardless of fruit color. A pink oxheart with potato leaves would be my pick for further work.

Tom

Thanks Tom,

The seeds are from a commercial packet [TomatoFest] so there is no way to know what the unknown grandparent is.-It is possible that the seed pack has mixed seeds but that would be no fun. I have to assume that [if it is f2 seed] the F1 from which the seeds originated looked similar enough to Anna Russian that it slipped by the quality the control supervisor ;-), so it probably was not a dominant gold gene expressed in the F1 that the seeds came from.

Your picture is a little small so I can't say mine are different. The two RL plants seem to have wispy leaves compared to the ten or so other RL varieties I'm growing, but the plants are healthy enough looking that a passerby wouldn't point and say "look at the funny leaves." The leaf development has been similar to Green Sausage, especially as seedlings -sad looking little things before they took off.


The young plants are just blooming now so it will be some time before I see any shapely green fruit, but I'll post pics as soon as something starts to happen.

How did the mystery plants and fruits turn out? Did you get some hearts?

Patrina

I got some really good tomatoes out of these unfortunately they were from stray seed and not crosses. Two plants were undoubtedly Lucky Cross, and the other one was a superior tasting pink beefsteak.