General Information

[celticman]

I have been toying with crossing tomatoes and throughly enjoying my small contributions to the Dwarf project. Tom it is clear you have a great deal more experience crossing tomatoes than I can ever hope to have.
My question is simple. Do you know of a good basic reference(s) on tomatoe genetics? Their are a millions of OP toms and likey as many hybreds. A good book/website/series of articals/and or any other references that give the basics. This tomatoes have trait X. Y is dominate over y ectra.
Celtic

[Tom Wagner]

I have been toying with crossing tomatoes and throughly enjoying my small contributions to the Dwarf project. Tom it is clear you have a great deal more experience crossing tomatoes than I can ever hope to have.
My question is simple. Do you know of a good basic reference(s) on tomato genetics? Their are millions of OP toms and likely as many hybrids. A good book/website/series of articles/and or any other references that give the basics. This tomatoes have trait X. Y is dominate over y ex cetera.

Celticman,

Your question about a good basic reference on tomato genetics placed me smack dab in the middle of researching a number of links that could help you. However, I tend to over try in my search and fall into inertia. There are so many ways that I could help you, but I find that I get into pre-writing a dissertation that goes off on tangents. I need to learn how to keep things simple. I will save my research, document writings, website links, and arguments to edit at another time. The problem is...I get around to answering about 25% of the posts here, with the overwhelming majority of my planned answers lingering in Word Document saves.

I get busy doing things like crossing 70 tomatoes yesterday, cleaning out my files, general housecleaning, planning more plantings, talking on the phone, answering questions on my own forum, driving to where ever, and otherwise finding excuses for not completing my discourses.
Today, for instance, I got sidetracked on identifying the actual selection of Beaverlodge tomato and its' pedigree. I used it as a male parent in about 9 crosses yesterday. It appears to have Fireball, Firesteel, Fartherst North, Polar Circle, Victor, Bison, etc. in its' distant ancestry. I had to record the genetics of the line in terms of knowing what genes it carries and what is dominant and what is recessive. The main thing I wanted to determine is what amount of cold setting ability it has and how it is manifested as to other lines like the related Sub Arctic series. I found some newspaper articles of two years ago for the Seattle area that indicated the flavor was a bit lacking.

More later.

Tom Wagner