Thread: Green Bee
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Old August 7, 2018   #17
Fred Hempel
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Join Date: Dec 2010
Location: Sunol, CA
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I am not a measurements guy. I am a comparison guy, and Green Bee competes well. It does not seem to have an achilles heel.

Green Bee is an open vine and the plants are the best looking plants in my field.
I have a number of other hybrids I am growing and the Green Bee plants beat them all for vigor. There is also alot of hanging fruit, but I am not going to measure it. Cluster size looks to be 6-8 fruits per cluster right now in my field. But that might change.

The way I determine if a variety has good disease resistance, vigor and production is that I have a collaborator in Mexico who is a fantastic grower. He trellises and is very concerned about "commercial" traits.

If he says "I want thousands of seeds of X", I know that he has found X to be well above average in all important traits. He wants thousands of seeds of Green Bee.

Frogsleap is a master at efficiently stacking traits, via marker assisted selection. He is a real breeder, and he breeds like one.

I am a ecologist/evolutionary biologist, and I breed like one. My approach is to use lines with traits that are important in my crosses, but instead of tracking markers they may have to develop new elite lines, I rely on continuous HARD selection to develop lines with good vigor, architecture, disease resistance, flavor and yield. Basically, every summer I challenge my top lines in Ohio, in a field where they are exposed and abused. In the winter the top lines are grown in Mexico, and breeding lines are again exposed and abused.

In the end, my selections seem to produce lines with the traits I need. They won't have all the symbols (unless we assay for markers after the fact). But, I am not sure elite growers care that much about symbols and advertised disease resistance. They simply trial lots and lots of lines and look for performance in their fields, under the conditions in which they grow tomatoes.

Quote:
Originally Posted by nbardo View Post
Aside from flavor and texture, how are the plants? Yield growth habit cluster size etc? I know frogsleap was working on incorporating disease resistance with marker assisted selection. Does it have some of those traits?


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