F1 surprises

[Fusion_power]

Of the "cold tolerant" trial last year, Jagodka was the earliest to completely ripen all fruit on the plant and make a decent crop of tomatoes. I had Boney-M which ripened the earliest fruit, but it only made 3 or 4 tomatoes and then died. There were a few others that were exceptional in one way or another, but not-so-surprisingly, true cold tolerance was lacking and what was present was at best weak and unreliable.

[bower]

I grew out Jagodka in my living room window late this winter, and had ripe fruit 88 days from germination, which is amazing. It was so susceptible to botrytis though, as well as other foliage disease, I got no more than a pint or two of fruit before it had to be discarded (although still alive outdoors in pitiful condition). I did collect some pollen and may be able to get some fresh pollen still, to try a cross with LA 4268 which is flowering now in the greenhouse.

By comparison, Red Dwarf growing in the same conditions side by side with Jagodka had no foliage disease whatsoever, and produced a couple of pints of good tasting cherries, ripening 104 days from germination. The plants were growing in a south window with no supplementary lights, which is a tall order for a tomato.

For a cold tolerant tomato this year I chose Sasha's Altai on your recommendation. It's doing well and has set a cluster of fruit, so it's ready to start some crosses.

[Tom Wagner]

"COLD TOLERANT" can mean, surprisingly, as little or as much as you want it to be!

Here in Everett, Washington, I leave the windows open to get a breeze day and night...we don't get much wind anyway...so any air circulation is welcomed. On this date, June 16, and ten in the morning the heater is running. I turn in down as low as I can get it but since it is just now 50 F the heater is running. I rather like it cold but I am shivering a bit in just a tee shirt and shorts...no socks.

I have a bunch of tomatoes yet to put to the field, waiting for a bit of sun. This combination is kinda what I call for in the test for the so called "COLD TOLERANT" tomato varieties. It doesn't do a lot of good to cross flowers when it is this cold, the takes go down dramatically. The crosses I have made lately have been in the greenhouses. I doubt if one gets these conditions in Alabama and the majority of the tomato growing country.

Jagodka is an interesting tomato to some folks, and for that reason I made a single cross of it to my Dwarf Shadow Boxing down in the San Diego County last February. I will sow this seed to test for a late harvest in a high row tunnel greenhouse. Late season cold tolerance is totally different from early season cold tolerance or mid season cold tolerance. I will see if the F-2 generation provides me with a dwarf with purple stems and purplish leaves aiding it in light usage. I know that JAGODKA will give my Dwarf Shadow Boxing exceedingly earlier maturity in the segregation of traits. I am not too concerned about any perceived intolerance JAGODKA has in disease weakness...I can breed that out as I continue to breed out the weak traits in multiple breeding schemes.

The only reason I bred Jagodka to my Dwarf Shadow Boxing is that it was the earliest tomato to mature in a bench of early and dwarf tomatoes being compared by Mighty Mato. It was one of those contingency crosses I make in case something of value makes me want to explore something. If I get the cross into the greenhouse for later, I will undoubtedly find something later on to cross it with. Maybe an F-2 Sibirjak x Green Zebra or an F-2 of Imur Prior Beta x Spring Noir. One of my best earlies is my F-7 Borghese Vase Roman. I made lots of F-1 crosses of it....so I have no limit of what the cross the Jagodka hybrid to.

[bower]

"Late season cold tolerance is totally different from early season cold tolerance or mid season cold tolerance."

This is exactly what I have observed but it is the first time I've seen it discussed. The genetic complexity is pretty boggling.

It's been very noticeable, that the seedlings that wimp out in early cold and maybe suffer some foliage disease too, may still turn out to be great performers in the late fall (Danko is one standout example).

One thing I've noticed, that purpling of the leaves .(indicating phosphorus deficiency due to cold) is absent or reduced in cold-exposed seedlings of a couple of varieties that seemed to have pretty good cold tolerance throughout the season (Al Kuffa, Black Early and Indian Stripe are the ones I'm thinking of from last year). Then you have others that purple dramatically in the cold - Rozoviy Flamingo heart for example - but hang on into the fall without disease,happily purple, and set and quickly grow fruit in low temperatures when others have given up.... it's very confusing.

[Fusion_power]

Adding to the confusion is the "cold tolerant" tomato that just happens to be one that hung on barely alive long enough to get into warmer weather and then set a huge crop of fruit. Wheatley's Frost Resistant fits this category. It is not frost resistant, but it will hang on until warm weather arrives and then set a huge flush of flowers and fruit.

I agree that late season cold tolerance is a slightly different animal, but IME, tomatoes with significant overall stress tolerance tend to have better than average performance late in the fall. Eva Purple Ball falls into this category.

[bower]

Darrell, I wish you would please save me a few of your personal seed stock of Eva Purple Ball this fall, and I will give them another chance here. The jury is still out on gene expression, but I see some varieties producing earlier each year I grow them... I can only think that gene expression is being affected at the seed level. Patience may win out....
I loved the taste of EPB last year but they were not productive here, although it was by local standards an exceptionally sunny year and long season. Extras were in my farmer friend's greenhouse and EPB was panned by them as well, as a slack producer.
Maybe it was a bad strain of the seed, or maybe I cold stressed them too much, or maybe the potential is there but needs to be 'grown out'..

Of all the F1 crosses I made last year, EPB X PI 120256 is the only one I couldn't find a space to grow... so I hope you'll tell us how it turned out. (I justified leaving it out because I was hoping you would grow it)
My farmer friends will also take extra plants, but the risk element has to be low. The last year result meant that anything involvng EPB is considered high risk.
I must admit, we've been spoiled by two sunny and warm summers in a row.. this one is shaping up as the come-uppance. I am not optimistic about expanding into outdoor space this year - pretty much unlimited space in the context, but so harsh....
heavy sigh... should be an icon for that.

[bower]

Zolotoe Serdtse has the trait of dropping a flower or two in pretty well every cluster. This is not a happy trait if you are using the plant as the mother in a cross... lots of chance your chosen flower will be the one rejected. Well, it turns out that this trait was passed on to the F1 crosses Zosbe and Zosis.

Picture is of Zosbe cluster with the rejected blossom on the left, turning yellow at the 'elbow' on the stem... it will fall in a day or two.

[bower]

The third cross with Zolotoe Serdtse "Zosanko" or ZS X Danko has not dropped nor yellowed any elbows yet. Danko was not a dropper, so I'm hoping that trait is stronger.

Zosanko has a first pea sized fruit set this morning, and so does the mother Zolotoe Serdtse, so their 'earliness' is identical.

Zosanko started out looking very wispy and frailer than the rest, but it has turned into a gorgeous bush with the expected determinate growth habit (1 leaf between clusters), and larger clusters than ZS. The fruit is a little heart of course! Wonder if it will be red, or orange-red...

[bower]

I finally retrieved some data from the computer crash, and was able to check my germination dates and flowering times which I'd been keeping track of in a notebook. I have read (and reputable sources) that the F1 hybrid earliness is close to the earlier parent... This made me think that the earliness of flowering was probably dominant in the F1.... that's not what I'm seeing in my results.

Although it's also said that all components of earliness are subject to environmental effects, that first interval from germination to flower should be least affected by the environment, since in this case the seedlings have been coddled along during most if not all of that time period.

I'd like to copy over a table, not sure if it will be readable, but here goes...(edit... drat, not so!)

Variety.............. Year.... DTM g-flr flr-set set-blush
Zolotoe Serdtse 2013 127 59 14 54
Zolotoe Serdtse 2014 --- 59 30
Danko................. 2013 137 72 17 48
Danko less stress2013 132 71 12 49
ZS X Danko F1.... 2014 --- 72 17

PI 120256....... 2013 154 72 51 31
PI X Danko F1 2014 ---- 60 15

The cross of PI 120256 X Danko flowered earlier than either parent, as both were late bloomers, which I guess is attributable to heterosis effects?

But ZS X Danko flowering time was the same as the later parent.
And the same is true for these:
Variety Year DTM g-flr flr-set set-blush
Rozoviy Flamingo 2013 138 72 12 54
Al Kuffa .................. 2013 130 61 20 49
Al Kuffa (less stress)013 121 59 09 53
RF X AK F1 2014 72 9

Kimberley 2013 101 46 13 42
Zolotye Kupola 2013 144 55 42 47
Kim Kupola F1 2014......... 55 8
.
These are the only crosses with 10 days or so difference between the parents' flowering time, the others gave mixed results but with few days difference and only a single plant each, not really fit to draw conclusions..

Anyway, it's another surprise for me...

[bower]

Just to clarify the mess of the tables in the last post, the first column "DTM" is days from germination to ripening, so no figure yet for this year. Second column is days from germination to flower, ranging from 46 (Kimberley) to 72 for the 'late' flowering types. Third column is days from flower to pea sized set, and the last number is days from pea sized set to blush.

[bower]

Well, I finally have a first ripe fruit from the Zolotoe Serdtse crosses, and it is decisively "orange-red" and not red, so ZS orange is evidently from the Beta gene. I'm having a lot of yellow shoulders and discoloured spots this year due to extreme heat the whole month of July, so I'm really thankful I wasn't looking for any bicolours this time! I waited... and waited... and waited for this Zosbe fruit to be soft ripe and getting no darker. I compared the butt ends with an orange (Orange-1) on the left, and a red on the right, and Zosbe is a little redder than O-1 but no ways a full red. When sliced you can see that the skin is very orange, the flesh is more of a red-pink.

Many of these fruit and also Zosis are blunt hearts like the mother ZS. but some are also flat beefsteak shapes llike the pollen donors BE and IS..

[snugglekitten]

Bower, really excellent photos.

Right now I have a few tomatoes at F5 both from the same parents, but I took them in two different directions.

I don't consider f1s a nuisence, but I know where you are coming from.

[bower]

To update on the crosses with Zolotoe Serdtse, all of them were the same 'orange-red' colour, and confirmed that the orange colour is produced by the beta gene.

Also surprising to me, was the dominance of some other fruit characteristics of ZS. The overall shape, firmness of the fruit, strong skin that doesn't crack, slow ripening was seen in all of the F1 offspring, although when fully ripe they were softer than ZS. The three F1's were virtually indistinguishable from each other by looks. The interiors were redder than the outer skin and flesh. Zosanko was different from the other two in texture, mushier and more suitable for sauce, for sure. Taste of all of them was okay, but by texture best suited to processing . Incidentally I dried some ZS in the dehydrator and was really pleased with the sweet result.

The three near identical F1 fruit are shown in the photo on the white plate, with parent Zolotoe Serdtse two fruits above.

[bower]

Just to clarify, not all of the fruit of ZS crosses were heart shaped or pointy, there were some beefsteaky fruit too, although not as many.

As regards the random shapes of the Kimberley X Zolotye Kupola, Fusion was exacly right - lots of different shapes and sometimes all different in the same cluster. Some examples shown below. I also saw the same effect in Rozoviy Flamingo heart X Al Kuffa - some rounded but many heart shapes.

What was really surprising in Kim Kupola is the distribution of pithy cores in these fruit. Maybe environmental effects? It could be, as I did see large cores in some stable OP's as well, especially when they were oddly shaped. The 'bowtie' fruit, is not the most versatile in the kitchen...

One genetic trait I was happy to see in the F1 is the darker red blush in the center of the fruit, from Zolotye Kupola. I didn't expect this to be dominant, I do hope to see it in all the F2's though. Cores and colour shown below, sorry about the yellowness of the picture but it was very sunny back in July....

[bower]

There was some good news out of all these F1.s regarding the taste traits, although I wouldn't say so of the crosses with ZS. Kim X Kupola was also pretty bland when I first tasted it, which I figured may have to do with the half-lycopene in a red X yellow. But the neglected fruit which sat in a bowl turned very crimson and were much tastier the riper they got, so not entirely a waste of space.

But other F1's definitely had some of the taste improvement of the better parent. Rozoviy Flamingo X Al Kuffa had some of the mother's depth of flavour. BEISt Black Early X Indian Stripe was quite good, although not quite as good - a little lacking in the sweetness, in particular - as the IS parent. The best transfer of taste to the F1 was in the crosses with Black Cherry. Taste quality was there in both the Stubche and Fiabche F1's, very nice reds. And I am equally pleased with the F2 cherries of Fiabche, which were all very intense and great eating, so far. I have one black round in the F2 of the ripe ones to date (late planted and outdoors).

So... grow nine crosses, get a few good ones. My guess is that some varieties may be great parents for taste, some not so much? Or perhaps the "Beta" challenge is a bit much at the biochemical level, the poor fruit don't know what they're supposed to taste like?...