First time to grow a potato leaf

[TX-TomatoBug]

Thanks, @karstopography, for the useful link. She reviewed several varieties that I have, Michael Gunn also.

[BlackKrim]

@karstopography

Many thanks for all your info. Re Tatiana's, the info on all those varieties is helpful, but I do not think that site has been updated in several years as to suppliers of various not-well-known varieties. Tatiana's was my last of several attempts to find seeds for Tip Top (2" tomato, grows in clusters, with a pointy tip, and just a nice little all-round tom., but no success. Maybe it exists under a different name. It is larger than any cherry tomato.

[BlackKrim]

@LeftyLogan.


There are of course varieties of tomatoes where the pistil extends past the stamen and are more likely to be naturally cross pollinated.

Thank you for those interesting links - permies & opensourceplantbreeding. YIKES. That is some advanced info for the likes of me but interesting to read nonetheless; I actually trudged thru the first 7 pages, with 12 to go! "Polyamorous" indeed...

I do indeed remember the names of the male & female parts, even how to identify them, all the way back to about Grade 7 ("seventh grade" in the USA), but tom. flowers are so small; it's not like when I'm fooling with winter squash flowers.

What is the goal, I wonder, of all this. Is it to somehow introduce wild characteristics which were "lost", into big fat modern toms. or what. You'd have to travel to the wilds of central America, I guess, to see if you could find some truly wild toms. (as opposed to the ones sold here for years representing themselves as "wild".)

[leftylogan]

I do indeed remember the names of the male & female parts, even how to identify them, all the way back to about Grade 7 ("seventh grade" in the USA), but tom. flowers are so small; it's not like when I'm fooling with winter squash flowers.

What is the goal, I wonder, of all this. Is it to somehow introduce wild characteristics which were "lost", into big fat modern toms. or what. You'd have to travel to the wilds of central America, I guess, to see if you could find some truly wild toms. (as opposed to the ones sold here for years representing themselves as "wild".)

Tomato flowers are tougher because of their size and self-containment so getting the timing correct is extra important for any cross breeding experiments.

You're in the right direction for breeding in the true wild varieties. The argument is that all the modern tomatoes that have "improved" upon the base heirlooms for taste, colors, and productivity has actually narrowed the gene pool and made it weaker. So the idea is to reintroduce those wild traits and improve the health of the gene pool. Don't quote me on this part but I believe a lot of the old college breeding program varieties were some of the last concerted efforts to bring in wild genetics (think Rutgers, University of Florida, NC State varieties).

Solanum pimpinellifolium does make appearances in modern stuff as it's historically been one of the easier wild species to acquire. A lot of them had to be formally requested from the Tomato Genetics Resource Center Ascension - https://tgrc.ucdavis.edu/wildspecies but quite a few are now commercially available i.e. - Solanum peruvianum - https://store.experimentalfarmnetwork.o ... peruvianum and Solanum villosum - https://store.experimentalfarmnetwork.o ... m-villosum

Here's some more reading material!

One from this forum concerning Solanum habrochaites - viewtopic.php?t=4811

And some stuff on S. pimp from OSPB - https://opensourceplantbreeding.org/for ... 686.0.html

[KaguyaCloud]

What is the goal, I wonder, of all this. Is it to somehow introduce wild characteristics which were "lost", into big fat modern toms. or what. You'd have to travel to the wilds of central America, I guess, to see if you could find some truly wild toms. (as opposed to the ones sold here for years representing themselves as "wild".)

You don't necessarily need to travel to Central America to get wild seeds. Quite a lot of seed vendors do sell certain undomesticated species.

There's quite a lot of reasons, you could say. Most wild tomato varieties typically have higher disease resistance, higher vigor, and lots of different flavors(quite a lot being not so great). For that thread, it just seems that they want to create a population of tomatoes that are self incompatible, which is quite novel. This essentially means that you can create and maintain a pool of highly diverse tomatoes that requires out-crossing from the pollen of a different flower, meaning a lot of genetic exchange.

If you start off with a diverse population that has less of a chance to self pollinate, there's going to be a lot of different genes being mixed together. And if you grow that population of plants in your region, eventually nature will self select the best gene combinations that can adapt to the local climate and seasons. The self incompatibility leads to a higher chance of gene mixing between individuals within a population. There might be very interesting or advantageous gene combinations that are undiscovered that can improve yield, increase disease resistance, modify growth habit(like in micro-dwarfs), and/or create entirely new flavors.

[BlackKrim]

@leftylogan & KaguyaCloud.

Thanks for replying to my comment and for further info, and links. Lots of reading for me but I doubt that I will understand it all that well. If it's okay for me to ask, are you geneticists?

Off topic. Has it occurred to anyone here that there are not really countless different varieties of heirloom toms, as we are led to believe? That there's just maybe several dozen in total, with each variety having 40 different names but no one has bothered trying to sort it out through testing? It seems that there are really only a few basic types. I myself was given "unknown" seeds from Ukraine 22 years ago by someone who not only could barely speak English, but she didn't even have a Ukrainian name for it. Someone who had been in the old country gave her these seeds. So I named it. In time, someone will maybe rename it after I pass it along. How many times has this kind of thing happened? I say, probably a lot.

I was wondering, too, how many generations of growing a variety in a new locale (rather different from the last one it had adapted to) would it take to noticeably change the variety.

Sorry - just jabbering a bit. Thanks for listening.

[BlackKrim]

@ TX-TomatoBug.

@BlackKrim, I think this forum is a great K-university tomato school. And talk about affordable tuition...!

Ha ha. I had a good wheezy laugh over the above!! About that affordable tuition, there are certain highly learned persons here at tom. junction who just might send me a bill for patiently answering my questions.

[leftylogan]

@BlackKrim I was talked out of going into plant genetics when I was in high school so I'm an environmental scientist instead. I don't enjoy rigorous lab science so the field science and all its variables was more for me. I tend to look at things through an ecology lens which has a genetic component.

I've had similar thoughts about how are these varieties actually different and not just selections of the same variety with a different name. I don't think we'll ever know for sure unless somehow a bunch of money appears to do all the DNA mapping.

I like your second question too. How many generations would you have to select a certain trait from a Black Krim plant until you can call it Manitoba Krim and how different is it exactly? Would it not be better as something like Black Krim - Short Season?