Tomato Gene List

There used to be a comprehensive list of tomato genes on the web, then one day that page was gone.  I wish I had saved that list somewhere safe, but I didn't.  I really could have used it to decide on a few tomato breeding projects I was considering.

I searched and now have a long (twenty page) list of tomato genes.  Even though not all of these genes are present in Australia, this list can be very useful when breeding new varieties.

I tried to put a downloadable pdf file on my blog so it would be easy for me to find.  I just can't work out how to do that.  Instead I have a link to the pdf: Gene list pdf

Various tomatoes - understanding the genes can make it simpler to breed something new

Various coloured tomatoes

I also have the tomato gene list in word and excel, if that is more useful I can email them to you if you provide your email address.  To contact me there is a 'contact form' on the right hand side of the page under the page views.  If you are viewing this on your mobile phone please scroll all the way down and click on 'view web version' and you will then be able to see and access the contact form.

I do sell seeds of some of the tomatoes I grow, if you are interested they are listed on my for sale page along with various perennial vegetables and other interesting plants.

Giant Edible Dandelions

It is no secret that I like dandelions (Taraxacum officinale).  I honestly believe people should grow more dandelions.  I think they probably have more uses than just about any other temperate permaculture crop.

Dandelions take no real effort to grow outside of arid or semi arid zones or polar zones, they are simple to grow organically, they are perennial, they are forgiving of a wide range of conditions, the leaves are edible and more nutritious than almost every other vegetable, the roots are edible and nutritious, the roots can be made into a delightful coffee or tea, the flowers are edible and nutritious, dandelions flower most of the year to feed and attract a wide range of beneficial insects, native birds are attracted to their seeds, poultry and other livestock adore eating the leaves, they are great companion plants for a wide range of vegetables and fruits, the tap root can be very deep, they make excellent compost, and as a real bonus dandelions look very pretty.

Dandelion leaves for comparison - mine at the top, regular ones lower

I have seen people sell dandelion seeds and plants, and often wondered why.  Usually they are selling the same unimproved plants that you can find as roadside weeds, the same ones people try to spray out of their lawns.  These are edible and very useful, but tend to grow into small plants.

Dandelions are incredibly useful and far more nutritious than almost any other vegetable, so I decided to see if I could improve dandelions.  If dandelions were larger, more productive, and more vigorous they would be more useful as vegetables and more useful as stock or poultry feed.

Dandelion flowers are pretty

Dandelion breeding is strangely difficult as they usually tend to display apomixis. This means that cross pollination does not often work.  Each flower is very difficult to pollinate and often sets seed without any fertilisation.  I can't tell if cross pollination worked unless I grow out the seedlings fora long time.  There were a few dandelion breeding programs decades ago, so I read a few old papers and got a few ideas how to increase cross pollination success.

Dandelions tend to grow different depending on the environmental conditions.  When grown in the lawn and mown regularly they tend to produce shorter plants, when grown in long grass they tend to be more elongated.  Dandelions are perennials that also tend to be different sized plants at different times of the year.  All of this makes breeding improved strains far more difficult than I would have liked.

After a bit of work it appears that I did improve dandelions.  They grew larger, more vigorous, and more useful that the regular ones that can be found in the lawn.  My plants can grow huge if treated well.

Massive edible dandelion plant

Regular dandelion leaves often range in length from 10cm to about 25cm, sometimes a bit longer under the right conditions.  If they are to be eaten as vegetables this is a bit too small and you would need to grow a lot of plants to make a meal.

My dandelion leaves reach well over 50cm in length.  This makes them far more useful as leaf vegetables.  The roots grow very thick and long, which makes them far more useful.  Every part of these plants grows pretty big.  One single plant can be massive.

My kids were joking that these plants are so big they should not be called "Dandelions", instead they should  be called "DaddyLions".  I am not sure how I feel about that...

The flowers and seed heads are usually large and fat

My dandelion leaves grow huge

Often dandelion seedlings are exact clones of the maternal parent.  So while mine open pollinate, and there are plenty of wild type plants around that could act as pollen donors, there is a really high chance that each of the seedlings will grow true to type.  If not, then the seedlings should still be large as they would carry 50% genetics from the giant parent.

I now sell packets of dandelion seeds through my for sale page.  They have been grown organically and are open pollinated.  Growing conditions do have a large role on dandelion phenotype expression, so to get large plants they need good soil, full sun, and regular water.  Second year plants grow far larger than first year plants.

Breeding new black tomatoes

I have started to mess around with breeding new black tomato varieties.  I mean true black tomatoes, the ones that are high in a powerful antioxidant called anthocyanin, not the muddy brown tomatoes that often are called 'black'. 

I have some lines that are segregating and if they are any good will try to stabilise them over the next few years, and other lines are almost stable.  The deep black colour of some of my crosses are incredible.

Some of my ripe black tomatoes - their colour is incredible

When they are unripe, the tomato fruits take on an amazing purple colour.  The black is only on the skin, the colour of the flesh underneath the skin changes the colour of the ripe fruit.  To get the darkest black a clear epidermis appears to work well.

If the tomato fruit is red underneath, the colour of ripe fruit are not overly impressive.  If the tomato is yellow or green underneath it allows the fruit to take on an incredibly dark black colour when ripe.

These ones had black skin and green flesh

The ones that are green under the black taste the best so far.  Unfortunately they are far too difficult to tell when they are ripe, I can't tell if they are ripe unless I gently squeeze them, so I will likely not continue with those lines. 

Unripe fruit displays stunning purple colours when unripe

Some of these black lines are also heterozygous for the woolly gene, others are dwarf, some indeterminate, and others determinate.  I certainly want to keep the high anthocyanin fruit but have a few options with various other traits.

I will see what other traits pop out before I decide which lines to keep. 

The fruits get darker as they ripe

Interesting black/purple unripe tomatoes

I grow things very close as I lack garden space

These tomatoes are incredibly black

I am not intending to release any lines that are not stable varieties.  I may change my mind in the future, or I may eventually sell seeds of lines that I have stabilised.  If this happens they will be listed on my for sale page with other vegetable seeds, perennial vegetables, herbs, and other interesting plants that I sell.

Update: this variety has been stabilised, I call them "Tracey".

Giant Parsley

A few years ago I decided that parsley (Petroselinum crispum) was too small to be very useful.  Even the larger varieties such as 'Giant of Italy' are a bit piddly.  I figured parsley would be better as a leaf vegetable rather than a garnish.  So I bred parsley to have larger leaves.

I may have gotten a bit carried away.  My parsley is now so large that the leaves can now easily be used as a vegetable.

Normally you add parsley at the end of cooking, but my larger parsley holds up reasonably well to heat and can be added earlier during cooking.  The roots are large enough to be roasted, and the leaf petioles can be used similar to celery - but taste far nicer.

My parsley gets even larger than this

My parsley is not a stable variety yet, as a population it still shows some genetic diversity.  Some plants have leaves that are absolutely massive.  Some plants have very large leaves.  A small number of plants have reasonably large leaves.  People who see it often comment that they have never seen anything like it.

I only allow the larger plants to flower, and only collect seed from the absolute largest, that way any seedlings have a solid genetic base but still retain at least some degree of genetic diversity.

Each of the leaflets grow huge

They get larger than this

There are a few varieties of 'giant' leaf parsley around.  My parsley dwarfs any 'giant' varieties that I have ever seen.  In fact, all of the 'giant' varieties are rather puny and insignificant in comparison to my parsley.

The craziest part of this story is that this isn't as large as parsley can get.  With a little more selective pressure it will be even larger than this.  I don't have the time or space to do anything too seriously, but even with modest selective pressure my plants are still getting larger every year.

"Giant Italian parsley" at the top, my parsley underneath

At the moment my parsley is not a stable variety, and my plants seem to get larger each year.  If you plant a bunch of seeds most grow into huge, and some are very large, and the occasional one is regular sized.  It is not difficult to cull the smaller plants and only save seed from the huge ones to end up with a size that works well for you.

If you are interested in growing ridiculously large parsley I will probably offer seed for sale through my for sale page.  Just keep in mind if you do buy this seed that it does not grow true to type and a very small percentage will be large but not all that impressively sized.

What Does Parsley Root Taste Like

A while ago I was removing some self-seeded parsley from my vegetable garden to make space to plant other things, and I noticed how long parsley's root is. This is large enough that it could be eaten as a root vegetable.

They varied considerably, the largest were about a foot long, and 2 or so inches wide, smaller ones were pencil thin and not very long. Most plants had a single tap root like a white skinny carrot, while a few plants had roots that were a little forked.

To be clear, I am not talking about the plant bred for root production known as ‘Hamburg parsley’, or ‘Dutch parsley’, or ‘turnip-rooted parsley’. I am talking about the roots of regular parsley whose leaves I use as a herb (I know in some countries it is acceptable to say “an herb” but I just can’t bring myself to do that as it sounds so absurd unless you mispronounce the word herb. I have also been told that it is correct to use the term “a herb” here in Australia).

Parsley roots

I tried to grow Hamburg root parsley once in the past, but the seeds I bought were too old to germinate by the time they arrived in the mail. I complained to Diggers that when they posted them to me the seeds were already a year past their expiry date. I was initially given excuses, when I pushed my point they begrudgingly sent replacement seeds.

These replacement seeds that Diggers sent me only had 1 month until the expiry date that was printed on the packet. Needless to say none of those seeds germinated either, and my distrust of Diggers club and their dodgy shameful practices started to grow...

Parsley leaf

Another parsley leaf - my plants grow large

As I had some parsley plants that I had already dug up I decided to eat their roots, but I wanted to know what they tasted like. I looked on the internet to know what to expect the parsley root to taste like.

I read that the odour is warm-woody, spicy, somewhat sweet herbaceous. Or they taste sweet, earthy and herbaceous. I have also seen it described as a taste between celery and carrots with a little parsley leaf and turnip. I found mention that parsley root has a more delicate, sweeter and more herbal taste than a parsnip. Confusingly I have read that “parsnip is sweet; parsley root is not”.

None of these descriptions were overly useful, some were contradictory, so I decided to taste some parsley root raw as well as roasted.

Parsley leaves: flat parsley at the top, my improved parsley underneath

I am really bad at describing taste. To me the raw parsley root was herbaceous, earthy, and spicy. It was kind of carroty, certainly not without its charm but not the greatest. I don’t think I would be able to eat very much raw before it would overpower me. That being said, once I ate some I wanted more not long afterwards. Just thinking about the taste of raw parsley root makes me want to eat more right now, which is odd because it wasn't all that remarkable when raw.

While raw parsley root tasted ok, roasted it was a completely different story!

I don’t really enjoy raw carrot, but I love roasted carrot. I kind of like raw skirret, but I adore roast skirret. In the same light, raw parsley root was ok, roasted parsley root was far superior.

Roasted parsley root tasted similar to roast carrot, or roast parsnip, but better, and herby. Parsley root kind of tasted similar to skirret, but not quite as good. If you have ever eaten skirret you will understand that this is extremely high praise!

The parsley roots I ate were all rather long, and fat enough, but they all had an inedible woody core that was even difficult to cut with a knife. I used my teeth to scrape off the soft flesh and I discarded the core. The roots I ate were all from volunteer plants that had self-seeded, so they had been through times of no water and other times where I harvested their leaves. Some were flowering while others were one year old plants. Most had a lot of competition and were crowded by nearby plants.

I don’t know if the woody core was caused by neglect or if they always have the woody core. I also don’t know how they compare to the varieties bred for root production such as Hamburg rooted parsley as I have never eaten one.

Parsley plants with long tap root

Earlier I grew a remarkable plant that may have been a parsley x skirret hybrid, or it may have been a massive leaf parsley. I don’t actually know yet but I suspect it is just a really impressive parsley. If it was just a massive leaf parsley, then its seedlings should also grow tremendously long and fat roots. I am growing out some of its seedlings, and I have let seed fall for its seedlings to volunteer, so we will see what happens.

So there you have it, to me raw parsley root tastes ok, and roasted parsley root tastes great.  I have been sent some seeds of a variety of root parsley, I plan to grow them out and see what they are like.  If all goes well I will have another great tasting vegetable that I can't buy at the markets, and self seeds readily in my garden.

Woolly leaf black tomatoes in Australia

This summer I grew a woolly leaf tomato called 'Woolly Kate'.  It is unlike anything else I have grown.

Woolly Kate tomato is not an F1 hybrid, it is not GM, it is a stable variety that was conventionally bred, open pollinated, and is simple to save seed from each year to be able to grow it again in the future.

Woolly Kate carries the woolly allele that causes the leaves, stems, and fruits to be covered in fuzz.  It also has black/blue fruit wherever the sun hits it and is yellow underneath and yellow anywhere the sun does not hit.

This is an indeterminate tomato plant, and it appears to be dwarf.  I like dwarf indeterminate tomatoes.  They have all the benefits of indeterminate tomatoes while staying relatively small.

All in all Woolly Kate tomato has a lot of interesting genes!

Woolly Kate tomato - black where the sun hits the fruit and yellow underneath

Woolly Kate tomato - look how black they get in full sun

Some of the tomatoes, like the one above are almost all black because they received a lot of sunlight.  Some, like the one below had more shade and are mostly yellow with only a little black.

Most of the high anthocyanin tomatoes are red underneath, meaning that they look incredible when not ripe but as they ripen the red starts to show through and they don't look as amazing.  Woolly Kate is yellow instead of red, meaning that when it is ripe it still looks pretty amazing ad the colours are intense.

Anthocyanin is a dark antioxidant, it is the same one that is found in blueberries.  As Woolly Kate is high in anthocyanin it is very healthy for you.

Woolly Kate - you can see where this one was shaded

I think that the most interesting trait of Woolly Kate is its woolly foliage.  The leaves and stems are covered in fine white hairs.

In the right light the plant shimmers and shines.  The leaves look amazing, and they feel incredibly soft.  When walking past I can't help but to touch these soft leaves.  My kids also can't help but to touch the soft leaves.

Woolly tomato leaves look incredible

The hairs can be rather dense, sometimes they look like they are covered in thick frost, other times they look like they are covered in soft down.

I am not sure if this fuzzy foliage would cause increased issues with tiny insects or if it would deter them, I don't really have problems with mites here so can't really comment either way.

I am told that the hairs reflect the heat and help this plant to be more water wise and to cope better in extreme heat.  To be completely honest I am not sure if this is true or not.  What I do know is that this summer when many of my plants failed in the heat/dry/smoke Woolly Kate powered through and fruited well.

I am also told that the hairs can help protect against mild frosts.  I highly doubt this claim but we will see what happens as winter approaches.

The stems and leaves are quite fuzzy

Another interesting feature of Woolly Kate tomatoes is the colour of the fruit.  They start out green, then they turn dark blue black where ever the sun hits them.  Eventually you have a shimmering white plant with black orbs hanging from it, which looks incredible.

Eventually the green parts of the fruit ripen and turn yellow.  I have never seen anything like it.  This tomato has been a real conversation starter with everyone who has seen it in my garden.

The fruit is black or blue where the sun hits them

Woolly Kate unripe fruits getting dark in the sun

The leaves are very fluffy

They turn black where sunlight hits them

Unripe fruit

The leaves are very fluffy

The fruit of Woolly Kate tastes good.  They are nicely sweet and sour, and when eaten raw I think they are improved by a little salt.  The fruit are small, but not too small to cut of and use on sandwiches.  I have not tried to cook with them or sundry them so don't know how they perform.

At first I was not sure if fuzzy tomatoes would be nice to eat raw.  Even though the fruits of Woolly Kate are fuzzy it isn't bad.  It is a soft fuzz, similar to a peach, and doesn't feel bad in your mouth. 

The fruit is covered in soft peach like fuzz

The down side to woolly kate is that the fruits haven't produced many seeds for me.  I am not sure if this is characteristic of this variety, or if the extreme conditions this year caused low seed set.

I hope to have some extra seed and be able to offer it for sale.  When this happens they will be listed on my for sale page.  Like all of my tomatoes and other vegetables, I grow them completely organically.

Woolly leaf tomato in Australia

Years ago I used to grow a tomato with the angora leaf gene.  This gene causes extra/branched trichomes on leaves and stems giving them a fluffy feel and interesting appearance.

I grow a tomato called "Angora 82" which kind of shows this trait, but not like I remember it.  This variety was in with some very old seeds (at least 23 years old) that I grew and I don't know where I originally got it from or where it got its name.  Angora 82 is high yielding, very compact, tastes very sweet, so it is worth growing, but it is not as woolly as the plants I remember.  None of the other old seeds with the word 'angora' or 'woolly' in their title germinated at all.  Considering their age I was happy that any germinated at all.

It appears that the angora gene was gone from Australia.  Importing tomato seeds into Australia is far too difficult and expensive for home growers, so it looked unlikely to be able to grow fuzzy tomatoes like this ever again.

Then a seed company in Tasmania listed one of the newer bred tomato varieties which carries this gene.  I didn't ask how they got this variety, I was just happy that they were able to sell me some seeds.  The variety they listed is called 'Woolly Kate'.

Woolly leaf tomato - looks like it is covered in frost

Woolly Leaf tomato flowering - stunning white foliage

This year I am growing a few "Woolly Kate" tomatoes.  They are a high anthocyanin tomato (they produce blue or black fruit) and they carry the angora leaf gene.  There are very few blue fruited woolly leaf tomatoes so being able to grow this variety is a real treat.

The leaves are green and covered in hairs.  None of these photos do them justice, in the right light they shimmer white and look like they are covered in frost.  Sometimes in late afternoon they sparkle in ways that I can't explain in words.

There are a few different genes that can cause the woolly leaf trait in tomatoes.  One is dominant and is homozygous lethal, and one is recessive.  It is difficult to tell them apart without growing out a large number of seeds, and crossing them with a variety that does not carry this trait is very helpful in working out things.

I am happy to say that this is from the recessive gene.  This means it will be relatively easy to do some tomato breeding and insert this gene into other new varieties. 

Woolly tomato leaf shimmers in the right light

Many plants that are covered in hairs like this use it as a way to protect themselves from harsh sun or excessive heat.  Sounds useful in Australia.  In other plants the leaves help protect them from mild frosts, which would be useful in extending the growing season.

It is currently unknown if this woolly leaf trait helps tomatoes be more water efficient or grow better under hotter condition or protects from mild frosts.

I would also be interested to know if tomatoes with woolly leaves are more resistant to pests and diseases, or if they have more issues with pests and diseases.  At this stage I am not really sure.

This summer has been the hottest on record for this region, it is also driest on record for this region, and I have very little water, so it will be interesting to see how the yield of these tomatoes compares to other varieties.

Even if the woolly leaf trait does not help in any way the plants really look amazing so I will keep growing them.  The leaves also feel soft, kind of like a plant called lambs ears (Stachys byzantina).  My kids keep touching the leaves each time they walk past them, they are really fascinated with Woolly Kate tomatoes.

Woolly Kate in the foreground, various other tomato varieties in the background

This summer has been pretty dreadful in my garden (and pretty much everywhere else in Australia).  I planted late, then it has been very hot, very dry, I haven't had much water to spare, we have had several intense dust storms, and there have been many weeks of thick bush fire smoke.

At this stage I don't know if my plants will survive summer.  This summer already I have lost a lot of things that have always performed well for me.  My other surviving tomato plants are all flowering but the flowers are aborting, so far only Woolly Kate has a few unripe fruits that have not dropped off.  The tomatoes are fluffy and the plants seem to be handling the extreme conditions better than my other varieties so far.

Woolly Kate grafted to a regular leaf plant, the difference in foliage is amazing

If I get to save seed from Woolly Kate and if I have enough spare seed I will try to list them for sale through my for sale page.  If not I should have enough seed to sell in future years.  I also have plans for breeding with them to get a few other varieties with woolly foliage in Australia.

Woolly leaf tomato with unripe fruits

Blue fuzzy tomatoes still not ripe

True potato onion seeds Australia

We have so few varieties of potato onion (Allium cepa var. aggregatum) in Australia, they used to be grown in every home garden and now they are increasingly rare. For a few years practically nowhere sold them, I am happy to say that this seems to have passed and a few places now stock potato onions to sell to home gardeners. They only appear to have one or two varieties, but it is a great start!

Potato onions are perennial vegetables that are great for permaculture gardeners and kitchen gardens. They are simple to grow, they reproduce by them selves, they return decent crops, but they are too small for my liking.

Potato onions usually don’t flower and the flowers usually won’t set seed, so there are no serious breeding efforts aimed at increasing their size. To remedy this I needed to make my plants flower and produce seed.

A few years ago my potato onions flowered and set viable seed, not many seeds but a few. It took a bit of work but I got a few seedlings from them. All of these displayed a high amount of genetic diversity and every seedling was unique and distinct from all the others.

Oddly enough my seed grown plants showed an increased propensity to flower and a good number of their seeds were viable. Breeding potato onions then became not only possible but also pretty easy.

Seed grown potato onions from the same batch display a lot of genetic diversity

Then a grower friend of mine generously gave me some potato onion seed that were descended from the rather impressive "Green Mountain" potato onions. I grew these and got some nice seedlings from them.

I allowed all my plants to open pollinate, planted a lot of genetically diverse seed, and culled hard. As I now had flowering potato onions from diverse genetics I was able to select for larger onions of different colours. I quickly made a lot of progress, I selected based on size and colour. What I didn’t do was think this through.

After a while I had large onions that did not multiply and had little storage ability, much like many onion varieties that already exist but with less storage ability. I moved house and lost the majority of these ‘potato onions’.

In hind sight I am glad that I lost them, they grew fast and were very large and looked really impressive, but they were a step backwards.

Some seed grown potato onions - highly variable

I still had some of the parent stock that can set seed, and I still had some of the Green Mountain seed that was getting old and losing viability. So I started again, but this time I am putting more thought into it.

This time I have less space and less time so progress is painfully slow, but I am taking a more strategic approach so should get a better outcome.

I still want larger onions, current potato onions are too small to be worthwhile growing and the larger size is the entire point of growing potato onions from true seed. I also want a few more colours, the current potato onions are lacking in this regard. This time I am also selecting for their ability to divide, and for their storage ability. It is these last two criteria that differentiate a regular onion from a potato onion, losing these traits just makes another variety of regular onion.

The ability to divide is one of the most important traits. The whole point of potato onions is that they are perennial and divide so you never have to bother with saving seed.

All these seeds were planted the same day, some are big and some are tiny

Allium seeds tend to have a short life and viability of seed tends to drop off rapidly after a year. Each year I produce more true potato onion seed than I can sow, and rather than waste this I thought I would offer it for sale in Australia to people who are interested. Who knows, perhaps someone will grow something amazing from this.

I plan to sell mixed true potato onion seed from the original stock as well as from the lines I am trying to develop. Some may contain genetics from the improved Green Mountain onions while some will not. This seed is produced from potato onions that divide in my garden and have reasonable storage.

Some of the parent potato onions

Various potato onions

White potato onions multiplying

This has been open pollinated, so I have no way to know what unique genetic combinations will exist. I only grow perennial onions and it may have crossed with any or none of these. This is open pollinated seed and each seedling will be genetically unique. Any plant that is perennial is a new variety and you will be able to share it around and name it as you wish.

Every seedling will be unique, some will produce large bulbs, others will produce small bulbs, and some may not bulb at all. Some will divide like mad, and others will not. Some may grow top sets but most will not. Most should be perennial but there is a small chance that some may be biennial. There should be a nice range of colours.

Potato onion flowers - should produce a lot of seed this year

Honey bees like potato onion flowers

Being open pollinated means there are no guarantees of anything other than diversity. I only collect seed from plants that have reasonable sized bulbs and divide well. Having a decent plant as the female parent increases the chances of growing something good.

As onion seed generally has a short viability I only sell seed that is less than one year old. My potato onions are flowering right now. If you are interested in true potato onion seed it will be listed on my for sale page when it is available.