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Post by Tom Wagner on Aug 22, 2014 0:52:33 GMT -8
Yeah, that is the name for a hybrid I made recently. I only have nine seed total. The female line is Dwarf Shadow Boxing and the male is Kimberley.
The hybrid will be a compact semi determinate with slightly blue tints on red fruits. The foliage will be regular leaf, and the maturity should be fairly early. Do I think this should always be made as an F-1? NO!
Kimberley is a potato leaf compact indeterminate red salad tomato that has pretty good flavor for an early.
Dwarf Shadow Boxing is as it implies ...a dwarf...and has regular leaves and blue fruits with a delightful shadowed striping. The flesh is red. Some really like the flavor.
The F-2 seed will be more valuable since we could select for potato leaf dwarfs with blue striped red fruits. Cool!
I should send the seed to a winter grow out to get the F-2 seed, right? Would anyone want to participate or buy the F-2 seed?
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Post by Anthony Fischer on Aug 22, 2014 9:17:54 GMT -8
We would be interested in purchasing some F2 seed.
Anthony Fischer
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Post by Tom Wagner on Aug 22, 2014 12:14:12 GMT -8
Thanks, Anthony, at my scale of business emerging from my breeding work...even one person makes a difference.
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Post by tickledtoad on Aug 22, 2014 17:53:18 GMT -8
I may need a, "Hey Ron, Remember these?", but yes, I would be interested in a few seeds of F2 as well.
tickledtoad (Ron)
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Post by Tom Wagner on Aug 22, 2014 18:22:19 GMT -8
I've got tons of F-1 and F-2 tomatoes to sort out. And yes, a reminder would be in order. This is not going to be an easy project for me to do if I continue this without end.
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Post by DarJones on Aug 22, 2014 20:14:36 GMT -8
The numbers are against you Tom. If you make one tomato hybrid and grow the F1 seed, then you need to grow a minimum of 128 F2 plants to see reasonably wide expression of segregation. Now if you make 10,000 crosses, you have to grow 1,280,000 plants to see all the variations. Somehow, I can't seem to get past a few hundred plants per year. I don't think that one person alone has much chance of growing plants on that scale. It would take an industrialized agriculture business to fund such a venture and would require about 100 acres of tomato plants grown per year with careful records and constant care. Somehow, the thought of growing 350,000 tomato plants on 100 acres seems a bit daunting to me.
Which reminds me that we should have a discussion about "Elite Lines" and why they are so important to tomato breeding. One way to look at it is that an Elite Line is like a thoroughbred horse. You can breed back to that thoroughbred to bring high quality traits into the most ordinary tomato. By combining an Elite Line with one or more genes that improve performance, the Elite Line can be further enhanced.
A good example of using an Elite Line is no further away than Eva Purple Ball. It brings excellent production, medium slicing size, small core, and decent disease tolerance to the table. Cross it with something that has Early Blight, Late Blight, or Septoria tolerance and the segregating offspring can easily be brought back to performance equaling Eva Purple Ball.
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Post by Tom Wagner on Aug 23, 2014 10:30:35 GMT -8
Oh, I agree! But what I am talking about with Shadow Mountain is growing out a few of the hybrids...getting quite a bit of F-2 seed and sell the seed on the website hoping to get 12 or more customers to buy the pack of 15 seed and grow them out. Then if one or more of those customers find a unique tomato...in this case a dwarf potato leaf with blue striped fruits with good flavor...they could send seed of that back to be for another growout. I could, in turn, grow it out and get F-4 seed and start the listing again in the website as a fairly decent on coming variety.
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