Wow! Thanks for all the responses.
Carolyn: Good point of course. I know taste matters, I suppose I rank taste last not because I'm eager to produce terrible tasting tomatoes, but because taste is subjective, and I have no particular taste goal (eg producing a citrusy taste) and I think one can't help but reflexively weed out bad tasting ones. But for example though most tomatophiles on here think yellow pears are spitters, the kids love them and can't get enough. This summer I put out a cherokee green grape, a reisenstraube, and a yellow volunteer and they combed over every bit of those tomatoes such that the teachers had to ration the kids to one tomato per kid per outside session. I've been bringing bags in from home to supplement their supply.
It is a montessori 3-6 year old classroom with year round programming, so they are still in session over the summer.
I spent some time poring over the tomatobase before posting this, but many of the dwarfs seem to be VERY small, around 12" and with limited garden space it seemed like a 12" plant couldnt really compete with the productivity of a 48" plant for the same amount of horizontal real estate. I pulled out a few dwarf varieties listed in the 36-48" range, but as far as I can tell from search the t'base, most of them do not also have high productivity and color range. I admit I did this by searching rather than manually sorting all 498 varieties.
Doug: I appreciate the warning. I know that breeding can be a long term endeavor, but I figure nothing gets done if you dont start, so might as well start sooner than later. I've read through a couple tomato breeding books and I think I'm going to take a mid range approach of starting with parents with as many of the desired characteristics as possible. Crossing them with some good humor and a willingness to eat my way through mishaps and mistakes. maybe we get lucky. And as the first goal is breeding for local use, we dont mind if we have to eat our way through some F1 and F2 generations, we dont need a fully stable line to enjoy the literal fruits of my/our labor.
Tom: Wow! thanks for the thoughtful response, especially from a breeding rockstar like yourself! I'll respond to you point by point:
You are correct that I meant the target was a large quantity rather than a large weight. My goof.
I didnt know that dwarf or prostrate were easier to breed than semi-dets. Thanks for the tip!
If you have those colors in the height and productivity ranges I would be really eager to grow them out or trial them for you if you are game to share!
Yes, their garden seems to have trouble with septoria and early blight. We havent had trouble with late blight thankfully. But because the garden is swarming with kids touching everything and exploring, you can't exactly practice pristine garden hygiene, so the plants need to be able to tough it out a bit.
I hadnt thought much about teaching the kids breeding because I didnt think they'd have the patience to wait from one year to the next to see the results, but if I understand your proposal correctly, it would be to simultaneously grow out both parental lines and one of the F1 crosses side by side in the same garden so the kids could compare. That is an incredible idea!! And the school garden would be more than glad to grow out and share back. If you go so far as to want to develop a K12 garden curriculum I could talk to the teachers about getting photo releases so we could document the kids enacting the projects at the school and you could have a ready set of art to go with your text.
As I mentioned above the school I am working with now is a 3-6 year old Montessori classroom, but montessori is VERY into the idea of the materials instructing the children, children learning by doing, which is very amenable to the scientific method. I was wanting to put together a garden curriculum for the kids that I would run once a week next year. Something simple for littlest children, that involves simple observations (the differences between potato leaf and RL leaves) graduating up to learning the parts of the flower. the kindergarteners help plant and plan the garden and could do a simplified version of the sci method that essentially focused on them observing and recording and analyzing the parental v F1 characteristics over the course of the summer, kids pooling their observations in a chart to track each F1 plants characteristics and progress. I'm sure as my son moves on to the local K-8 Montessori I will likely bring the garden approach with me there and see how it can grow.
If you want to put together a garden curriculum I would be more than game to help out with that. I'm a university professor so I dont have much experience with K12 education, but I have a general orientation to teaching and a bucket of enthusiasm for the project, so I'd be glad to help however possible.
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