Tomato breeding - the blight fight

[@fitztastico]

I found this video as I'm learning about tomato breeding and genetics and really enjoyed it. The one thing that surprised me is when you said one particular F1 plant showed greater disease resistance than the others. In terms of genetics, wouldn't we expect them to be equal in that regard? The only thing I can think that might account for variability in the level of disease resistance in F1 is if the parent paired to Paul Robeson was a hybrid. I'd love to hear your thoughts and real world experience on that to help me understand better. Thank you!

[@charliegray5833]

This is great, Pippa. Will be very interested to hear what happens. Nice to see you're on a roll with the videos too.

[@archstanton9703]

What were the overall results of your dwarf tomatoes? What about breeding a disease resistant dwarf tomato?

[@thoseplantpeople530]

We are hoping to do a video soon about the results from the dwarf tomatoes. We are already trying to breed a disease resistant dwarf. In 2020 we crossed Uluru Ochre, Sweet Sue and Purple Heart with the disease resistant plants in this video. We will be growing them out this year to see what we get

[@archstanton9703]

@@thoseplantpeople530That’s great! Will you sell seeds for shipping to the USA? I purchased Uluru Ochre, Tasmanian Chocolate, Adelaide Festival, Boronia, and Rosella Purple and will try them in our garden this Spring. I’m also going to be growing Ace 55, Bush Early Girl, and Roma Supremo. I live in the desert southwest and tomatoes have difficulty setting fruit, but will see how it goes with these varieties. I’ve been to Great Britain a couple of times, but the furthest north I’ve been is to Birmingham. I hope to go back some day, but in meantime, I’ll just have watch the BBC show’s on PBS and drink my daily PG Tips. Cheer!

[@thoseplantpeople530]

Cheers! P.G. tips is rather like builders tea, a bit strong. We’re Clipper tea drinkers, a bit wimpier! Due to seed-born diseases it is against UK legislation to export tomato seeds, sorry. TomatoFest have an incredible collection and indeed many dwarf varieties. www.tomatofest.com Good luck and thank you.

[@archstanton9703]

@@thoseplantpeople530 I was thinking of trying Taylors of Harrogate tea because I like a strong tea with milk. I guess were used to drinking coffee in the states and like strong tea. That's too bad about the seeds. I will try tomatofest.com. I am going to look into breeding tomatoes, and if it's not too difficult, I might give it a try. Thank you for the videos and look forward to the one on the dwarf tomatoes. Take care and stay safe!

[@thoseplantpeople530]

makemineabuilders.com

[@C3Voyage]

Enjoyed the content and I understand the need to keep the hybrid you crossed to secret. I do the same in my breeding program. I'm going to sub 'cause I enjoy fellow breeder's work. Best on your work and look forward to updates.

[@C3Voyage]

Notified you hearted my comment from some time back. How did your F3 plants produce? Did you find a candidate or two to move with?

[@thoseplantpeople530]

Yes, we have some plants doing really well in the polytunnel and will hopefully be doing another video soon. Work got stupidly busy and with very very slow upload speeds we haven’t done any videos in a while to will be doing more soon

[@C3Voyage]

@@thoseplantpeople530 Nice. Look forward to it. Breeding can be addictive!

[@thoseplantpeople530]

Definitely

[@rodicalionaki2256]

I would like to know your opinion about the dwarf tomatoes you had last year. Greetings from Crete Greece

[@grahamrdyer6322]

That's quite interesting, well done on your persistence, I've never thought of breeding for blight resistance only taste.

[@thoseplantpeople530]

Don’t get me wrong, flavour is always forefront but without the blight resistance alongside we are limited to what we can grow outdoors. We chose Paul Robeson as it is a black gourmet beefsteak tomato which we love for its intense flavours, we could never grow this outside but hope to have something similar with good outdoor qualities here in Yorkshire to free up space in the polytunnel. There are a few existing highly blight resistant tomatoes for growing outdoors, and we have tried them all, but the flavours are seriously lacking.

[@grahamrdyer6322]

I never thought about blight like that, I once breed a tomato for taste and that was a lot of work but more importantly a lot of space/time, it turned out ok but I didn't want a small plumb Tom any more and now grow beef toms, my sister last year gave me some tomatoes that just came up in her garden which is where she had one of my micro toms two years ago, last year it turned up bigger and with a good flavour so I'm also growing those this year.

[@thoseplantpeople530]

Good luck with your own breeding program, sounds interesting. Our F1 generation was grown out 10 plants per 10 L pot and 20 pots. This enabled us to trial 200 plants in a relatively small space as we pinched out the plants after their first truss since all we were interested in was flavour, size and blight resistance. The beauty of this method is you get to eat everything anyway so nothing goes to waste.

[@zom6198]

Nice to see the breeding is going well. I'm hoping to start breeding kale/brassica varieties this year.

[@thoseplantpeople530]

I love mixing the brassicas up. Especially the kales. You can get a really diverse range of leaf shapes and colours in one seed mix. The challenge is getting the varieties you want to cross to flower at the same time so it might be worth sowing them successionally to give you a better chance

[@zom6198]

Thanks for the tip, your right it's going to be tricky and crossing from unintended also. Do you isolate or just let them cross? I don't mind crossing but I have 2 varieties I want to keep, Sutherland kale and Shetland kale. I do want to cross them as they have traits I need but I also want to keep the original seed as they are now in short supply.

[@DanielTownend]

8 plants in one tub and you haven't been cutting off the leaves as they grow, I'm surprised they lasted that long!

[@fatboy9700]

hello, we lost all our plants to blight at home and at the allotment many times now, would there be any chance you could give me just a few seeds of your super plant please

[@rogermikardo]

You say that existing blight-resistant varieties are seriously lacking in flavour. I'm not doubting that, but it is contrary to the claims of seed suppliers!