Micro woolly dwarf tomato progress

I wrote an earlier blog post about crossing a micro dwarf tomato with a high anthocyanin tomato with angora leaf.  I am not great at cross pollinating tomatoes, but my cross worked.  

I dabble in vegetable breeding and have created some interesting new varieties.  I want to develop some lines of micro dwarf wooly tomatoes.  Eventually I would like a micro dwarf tomato that has high anthocyanin blue fruit as well as woolly foliage.

Micro Woolly Dwarf tomato progress

Micro Tom was the seed parent.  This is a micro dwarf tomato with red round fruit that tends to be slightly pointy at the end.  The pollen parent was a dwarf tomato with woolly foliage, this had round fruit that was black where hit by the sun and yellow underneath.  Using a dwarf crossed with a micro dwarf makes progress a little faster as there is one less gene to segregate in future generations.

The F1 cross was a dwarf plant slightly taller than the pollen parent.  It had slightly fuzzy leaves and fruit.  The fruit was red and round that was usually slightly pointy at the end.  Strangely enough not all of the fruit was pointy, I only had one plant but nothing was overly uniform.  This plant had high anthocyanin fruit that was black where hit by the sun.  It had traits of both parents, which was fun.

Most of the early fruit was red as it grew on the shaded side of the plant.  Strangely enough the fruit that got more sun didn't ripen until later.

Micro Woolly tomato progress

Some of the fruit is very black where the sun hit it.  This is a trait I would like to keep in some of the lines that I will develop.  Others will probably not have this trait.  I am planning on focusing on getting a few micro woolly tomato lines going.

One truss of tomatoes has confused me.  Somehow one tomato in that truss is black, and the rest are red.  I don't understand how this could have happened.  I can't imagine one tomato in the truss getting sun while the others were in shad.  Perhaps there is an early stage of development where they need sun to turn black and all except one were shaded?  

How is this even possible?

I like the look of black tomatoes

Micro Tom tomatoes are a tiny plant, the tallest I have ever grown is 10cm tall.  Next generation I should be able to produce some micro woolly tomatoes that won't be much taller than that.

As I will be largely dealing with recessive (or partially recessive) genes it should be easy to plant a huge number of seeds and cull anything that is not woolly or micro dwarf.  Micro dwarf should start to appear in the next generation, they should not be a great deal taller than Micro Tom.  I don't plan on keeping anything that is over 15cm tall.

I am tempted to plant some seeds now and try to sneak in an extra generation on my window sill over winter.  Then again it may be best to wait until spring and plant several hundred seeds and cull them hard.  There won't be room on my window sill for doing something like that.

Full grown Micro Tom tomato

The next generation should see some real progress, then it will be a few generations after that to stabilise any lines.  Luckily I can normally grow two or so generations per year of micro tomatoes so this should not take as long as other things that I am breeding.

At some stage I will sell seed through my for sale page, but that won't be until the lines are stable.  I do have seed of other things that I have bred.  If you are interested go and have a look.