Colors and Taste

[wykvlvr]

In big tomato plants I love the spicy flavor of Green Zebra, the earthy, smoky complex flavors of a good black and crave a chance to taste the fruity flavors of bi colors and whites... Sadly it is hard for me to grow these tomatoes here due to my short growing season and cool nights. So what if we could bring them to our micro dwarf tomatoes?

I do know I can get the colors and in fact we already have some really colorful tomatoes in our projects. One set of seeds I have here are from a 113X F5 that came from a 9 inch plant that make purple with green stripes tomatoes. I have also seen others who have different colors in their lines.

My quest is to try and bring those big plant flavors AND colors into our micro dwarfs. I think the color part will be easy but the flavors may prove to be more difficult so any hints or idea are welcome.

Current plans - Winter 2021 cross Fat Frog and Rosy Finch to bring together many of the solid color genes. Grow out some of those 113X-F5 sees and see what color tomatoes they make. Possibly try crossing them to Fat Frog and Rosy Finch depending on the colors and flavors of them. Since these are all micro dwarf tomatoes I can grow them under the lights in my room and hopefully get some successful crosses done that I can grow out in spring.

[SeanInVa]

wykvlvr how are these coming along for you? A newer member has expressed interest in green, black/brown, purple and ochre colors.

[Greenie]

Yes! This is right up my alley. I have some Fat Frog and am going to play with it and some of my favourite colours, but it's a low producer for me so I'm also going to poke at some other options. I'm very interested to see what Fat Frog x Uluru Ochre do, since that seems like one of the quickest routes to something managable.

[wykvlvr]

Sadly I got waylaid with health problems so have not gotten any crosses made this year. I did have a lot of first time varieties in the front yard that I picked with an eye to crosses. Then we got hit with heat wave after heat wave... sort jumped from winter to full blown summer and everything stalled. We are cooler now and I am starting to see new flowers so time to collect pollen and get something attempted.
I tried a couple of new to me micros plus the Rosy Finch and I have one F3 from the seeds I was sent that I raised. The F3 is a potato leaf the rest are regular leaf. Rosy Finch is probably the main plant I will work with. I like the build, size and size of their tomatoes PLUS as a pink it has clear skin and matched to the right yellow gene that could give me whites. Plans for this year if they work are to cross it with Lucinda (carrot leaf gwr) Big Hill (bi color with larger then normal flowers) and to Ladyfinger a pale yellow/white hanging basket tomato.
Winter I will probably go back to my micro x micro plans but I do have a couple of dwarfs that are supposedly flavor and have colors I want so we will see.