Brandy Stripe, then, now, when?

[papavic]

Tom, a few questions to start a conversation about Brandy Stripe ...

Where did it come from ... what's its lineage?

Is Vintage Wine basically a version of Brandy Stripe?

What would be some good mates to cross with Brandy Stripe or Vintage Wine, and what general characteristics should one expect from specific crosses?

What kind of future do you intend for Brandy Stripe types and offspring, and why in particular do you continue to use it in crosses?

Please feel free to answer as in-depth as you can ... all shapes and forms of rambling will be read with enthusiasm!

Bill

[tatermater]

PapaVic,

You must have been an interviewer in a former life, Bill!

My response grew to the point I put it in a topic all of its own.

Heirloom by Descent is that new topic.

i will go into detail later about your questions.

Your suggestion that,,,

Please feel free to answer as in-depth as you can ... all shapes and forms of rambling will be read with enthusiasm!

Did I ramble?

[papavic]

Tom,

I was hoping you WOULD ramble ... I enjoy it. You pretty much hit all around my original questions except maybe for "what would be some good mates to cross with Brandy Stripe or Vintage Wine, and what general characteristics should one expect from specific crosses?" Any time to run that around the block?

Bill

[tatermater]

Yeah,

I suppose I did skirt around what I use in crossing or what I would use f I were someone else.

Case in point. In 2006 I crossed White Beauty flowers with pollen from Brandy Stripe. The F-1 hybrid was grown during the 2007 season. The hybrid had regular leaves, slightly woolly, pink fruits of a large smooth shape, and faint stripes, and had outstanding yields.

I finished sowing the F-2 yesterday of my first wave of the filial generation. I will be looking in the ratio of 1:16 for a white striped brandy, or as I posted at another forum, a white zebra type. If I want a potato leaf with that it is 1:64. Fully woolly, 1:256. Add yet another trait that is true breeding and it goes to 1:1,024.

So if I want 7 traits to show up in a true breeding recessive trait ladened tomato plant, I have to plant over a thousand plants and be ever vigilant that I don't loose any plants. Selection work is best under high numbers if that is really important to you to immediately find that needle in the tomato pile. Mostly, one works with lower numbers, using intuition and clever clues, or just take it one year after the next, until segregations of one more traits is accomplished.

What to cross a plant with is inspiration and often serendipity. I can't always do what I set out to do. I take my successes and long for a few more. I can't tell anybody what to cross.

Tom Wagner

[ard]

Yep,
One of the things I have noticed while reading here and about is the way Tom would rather talk fishing than hand out fish.
Yet more conspiratorial than professorial.
The 'idea' or vision even that precedes the deliberate cross is unique to the individual and his needs.
Could plant breeding be an art form locked deep in our DNA (the Burbank loci parietal fold or some such undetected thing) usually, it seems, quite recessive?
Teach a child to garden, get'em good and infected by rich supporting soils and one my just activate this gardening pituitary into a Leonardo or a Warhol.

I'm sure you have mentioned them somewhere else Tom, but maybe you could tell us of some of your favorite 'one trick ponies', maters you seem to use inordinately often for breeding? Can I assume you use your own refined or inbred lines rather than picking up a commercial seed packet? Are you holding the Kellogg's Breakfast that laughs at disease but fruits spitters?
Retro-breeding? How's it done in tomatoes?
Brian

[tatermater]

Brian,

"Retrobreeding the Woolly Mammoth"

I love titles like this. It dovetails right into my often misspent efforts to breed tomatoes with seemingly no earthly values. Some weeds like wild tomatoes are not much more than that. So why would a breeder like myself want a retro tomato? If wild tomatoes had only grown in the tundra like the Woolly Mammoth, I could someday find the frozen DNA of long extinct wild tomatoes and magically insert them into my Brandy Stripe, the one with Woolly genes. I could lovingly bring the cells to fruition in a surrogate Pink Brandywine for Heirloom's sake.

Brian, I am getting to think you know me too well.

Tom Wagner

[kctomato]

tatermater said:

I will be looking in the ratio of 1:16 for a white striped brandy, or as I posted at another forum, a white zebra type. If I want a potato leaf with that it is 1:64. Fully woolly, 1:256. Add yet another trait that is true breeding and it goes to 1:1,024.

And hope the one in 1024 is decent! So better grow 2048!

I know you know this Tom but for others, a way to reduce that number some at the seedling stage would be to select only PL wooly seedlings. Then you could knock back the number of field plants and potentially have more individuals to choose from possesing the desired traits and quality.

Potentially.

[tatermater]

Keith,

Yes, I have written somewhere of that very thing of selecting in the seedling tray first, then in the field at harvest time. The only reason I put such ratio scares up is that most folks don't have the time, space, interest, knowledge, sticktoitness, or whatever to efficiently do the selection process smartly.

I am looking at several thousand individual projects that need a huge growout for selection purposes.
I even end up sometimes looking at a single plant in a recom effort just to advance the filial in an OK line. It leads to a bottle necking of diversity and the founder population once expanded is lacking.

Tom Wagner

[kctomato]

I wish I could save huge sib lines and then do selection in the f7 or so. Sure would help with diversity. I'd also have more things to choose from in the end.

Even if I had the land - it would be a daunting task to do for every line. That would likely be better for disease or some other quantitative trait(s).

/<...

[tatermater]

If, and only if, I get financed to my heart's content, I would like to hire a person for about 4 hours a day during the summer and fall harvest of tomatoes and even potato berries to do nothing but follow my seed extraction procedures. This would be done in the afternoon after I pick in the morning, or following some preconceived format of harvest/extraction. The idea is to do about 100 or so different extractions a day.

The tomato harvest would culminate with note taking, photos, measurements, flavor analysis, etc., with the seed treatment and drying with numbering identities closely monitoring the veracity of the lines.

The goal would be to aid me in the selection work of breeding, putting away the hybrid seed, the F-2 seed, and OP seed. In some cases the hired help would be there for bulk seed extraction. If one could go through a thousand lines a week, imagine how 15,000 to 20,000 units of seed could be inventoried in a 12 week period of time. I've done things similar to this when I was at Sun World east of Wasco, CA. At one time there three of us working together with the TSP, Hot water bath, and chlorine treatments. We used test tubes in the hot water bath for about 30 minutes, so each test tube was labeled with the extraction numbers, paper lined up, preprinted with the data, and it performed like clockwork. I would stop what I was doing often to double check everything. It was a system that i want to do again.

I still am growing plants out of the 1990 seed year envelops.

Reminds me too, that I trained two ladies to help me in the pollination process. We would drive out to the fields or greenhouses. I would make sure one lady was using pollen for one series of crosses and another lady with yet another pollen source. What I was able to do when they became more adept at all procedures, was to collect the pollen and then drop string tags near the flowers to be crossed, color coded depending on the pollen used. They would emasculate, pollinate, and write the string tag info. I would help if they had difficulty in emasculation during my spot checks.

Tom Wagner