Joseph's Tomato Experiments

[joseph]

Carolyn: Thanks for the feedback.

In my garden, Colorado Potato Beetles only eat one species: A wild nightshade weed. Because the beetles are year round residents, I have bred a population of beetles that are averse to feeding on any other species. (Or I have influenced their culture, hard to tell if the preference for the weed is learned, genetic, or both.) I have also bred a population of potatoes, tomatoes, and tomatillos that are not attractive to Colorado Potato Beetles. It is a death sentence to any beetle I find on a domesticated Solanum. It is also a death sentence to the plant. I don't want my plants to be confusing the beetles about what to eat.

I don't have BER in my modern-landrace tomatoes. Because I do not tolerate it. I see it sometimes in new varieties that I'm trialling, but yanking the plant up by the roots gets rid of that problem permanently. No second chances, not later this season, and not next season. In my garden, a variety has to grow perfectly, with the preexisting conditions, or it gets culled. I share my seeds widely. Anyone that wants to test them for BER resistance under their growing conditions is welcome to do so...
I don't grow cylindrical shaped tomatoes, and the fruits tend toward being 2 to 10 ounces, so seems to me that both of those traits predispose my tomatoes to be more resistant to BER. And my limestone/clay soil is full of Calcium and holds onto moisture well.

It is very arid here. That protects my tomatoes from all sorts of micro-organisms that thrive in damp places. I mean really arid. We often have 5% relative humidity on summer evenings. Dew points might be around 20 F for much of the year.. We had dew for a couple days this spring. That was super weird!!!!

I don't know if any tomato diseases exist in my garden. If they do, it doesn't seem like a good use of my time to try to notice and identify them. I'm certainly not going to spray my plants with anything to try to stop a disease. That would require identifying the disease. I select for plants that produce fruit in my garden, regardless of whatever else is going on with them.

Eventually, after I get a population of good quality tomatoes that is self-incompatible, (with genes from wild accessions,) I intend to seek out lots of collaborators in areas that are beset with blights, and rots, etc... Because if every seed in the population is a new F1 hybrid, it becomes trivial to throw hundreds or thousands of new varieties at the problem to try to find some genetic combination or other that is more resistant.

I'm expecting to harvest thousands of seeds of Solanum peruvianum, and Solanum habrochaites this month. They are still fully wild, but if any of you want to screen them for early/late blight tolerance, send me a SASE. I expect to share F1 and F2 hybrid seed as soon as it is available. Everything I do is about sharing and collaboration. The more people we have working on this, the faster the work goes, and the more directions it can branch out into.

I'm sharing seeds all along, but I think that things will really start popping when we get self-incompatible tomatoes fully developed. Collaborators are working with me on the self-incompatible project. More are welcome. Thanks to the collaborators that shared PI, LA and LYC accessions with me. DarJones sent me the original seeds for Jagodka, which came I think from Dan McMurray. That has been a mighty fine tomato for me, and is a key contributor to both the promiscuous pollination project, and to the frost/cold tolerance project. It isn't yet part of the self-incompatible project, but I hope it will be one of these days.

I am approaching plant breeding as an art. That drives the commercial plant breeders batty. I think of myself as a generator of diversity. Thinking of different ways to do things (promiscuous-pollination, self-incompatibility). I'll pass the baton to other folks to select and stabilize formal varieties.

I worked for 20 years as a research chemist. These days, the fewer records I keep, the happier I am. I'm not interested in keeping track of the paperwork to supervise the scoring of families of tomatoes for tolerance to late blight, septoria, or bacterial spot, but I'm very willing to send seeds to people that are.

I'm just a small cog in a tremendous plant breeding undertaking that has been ongoing for thousands of years. Thanks to all the ancient, modern, and future collaborators on these projects.