Tomato Breeding - Year One Review

This year I grew some of my first hybrid tomatoes - hand pollinated crosses of some favorite varieties.

The first hybrid showed some promise as an early producer with big, beautiful clusters of fruit. It's a cross between Principe Borghese, and red Italian cherry tomato grown for making sun-dried tomatoes, and Sungold, a massively popular orange cherry tomato available at most farmers' markets.

The second hybrid shows a lot of promise as well. It's a cross between Principe Borghese and Japanese Black Trifele, a dark Russian heirloom. Although it was a late producer and low yielder, the fruit were gorgeous and delicious and the plant showed remarkable resistance to late blight. The picture below shows the resistant variety to the left of a more susceptible plant. 

 

Next summer I'm hoping to refine these varieties, as well as try new crosses between my favorite heirlooms and the tiny wild tomatoes that I smuggled back from Grandma and Grandpa's backyard in Morelos (the one with the killer plum tree and the scorpions). 

Hope to see you all soon.

Love, 

Ben