Low Budget Tomato Breeding?

[Mark_Thompson]

“Here is a procedure that Tim Peters recommends for tomatoes: Plant about fifty seeds of your first generation in a half-gallon pot of soil. When they come up, select for early emergence and seedling vigor, and eliminate all but about ten. As the plants grow, remove all suckers and branches, and limit each plant to just one vine. In addition, you may need to prune the leaves - that is, remove all the older, bigger leaves to keep the plants from shading each other out.
When the plants start flowering and have set a few fruits, remove the tops. Then continue to remove all suckers and branches. Pay careful attention to soil fertility. Use good soil initially and fertilize as necessary.
The plants will be stunted compared to field-grown ones, flowering will be late, and the fruit will be small. But they ripen. You can determine fruit colors and shapes. You can tell whether the plants are determinate (shorter bush types) or indeterminate (con-tinual-bearing vine types). You can tell earliness relative to other plants grown similarly.
And you can select for disease resistance. For the latter, just shred some infected plant material on top of the soil in the pot.
During the second year of your breeding project, plant fifty seeds from each of your original ten plants in separate half-gallon pots. Thin, grow, prune, and evaluate as before. This time, though, save the seed from just one plant per pot, because you're going to use only ten pots per year. In subsequent years, choose just one plant per pot for inbreeding. In this way you can inbreed ten different lines out of a cross with just 5 gallons of soil.“

From Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties

Just curious if anyone has thoughts on this, seems a pretty genius way to save money on soil or save space for anyone with those constraints.

[Pippin]

Interesting method of growing more plants in small space. I believe there are more similar strategies, e.g. I remeber reading from Tville that Tom W let those multi-pot seed trays simply root to ground and made the first selection from those overgrowded trays. Plants would almost die but one can still select for fruit phenotype recessive traits because one fruit per plant is all one needs.

What I don’t personally like in the Tim’s method is the first thinning from 50 to 10 seedlings because some of the recessive traits (that express as weaker seedlings and slower germination) would be lost. So, I would prefer sowing only something like 12 seeds and keeping all that germinates. And I would sow all sizes of seeds, not selecting only the healthy looking larger ones. Then I might get a better represation of all genes from the cross. But it all depends on what one is looking for. Vigorious, healthy plants that germinate early is pretty good target for a breeding project.

I suppose 10 seedlings is enough to get all single recessive genes expressed in average twise. And there is still a good chance of getting multiple recessive genes expressed in one plant, if not in the first generation then at least later.

[Lemonboy]

When you're breeding anything you are basically betting that you'll find a useful combination of genes. What Deppe is describing is how someone can hedge their bets. Not by being selective, but by limiting which genes you're looking for. Early germination and seedling vigor isn't, however, a guarantee of lots of fruit or good looking tomatoes. And it doesn't matter how nice they look if the tomatoes taste bad or never really get ripe. Since everything is grown in pots this might be an acceptable method for breeding micros, but it doesn't seem generally useful.

[Cole_Robbie]

Half gallon is a really small pot. The plants would do a little better if they were on gravel, so the roots could go out the bottom a little, mostly to regulate temperature with the ground. There's a giant greenhouse operation in the southeastern US that raises all of their plants on the gravel floor of the greenhouse, which is also heated from underneath by recirculating hot water lines. When a worker picks up a tray, roots are coming out the bottom into the gravel, and all of their plants look beautiful.

[bower]

In a half gallon pot, this is almost a laboratory scale tomato grow. I've tried a lot of container sizes, multiple plantings etc. but I find there is a lower limit for a tomato to set enough fruit that you could actually evaluate taste. I'm not a big fan of the liquid ferts though, and people who use them effectively do manage astounding things with very little dirt.
I could see this being very useful in principle, for generations where you only want to select on looks alone and get enough seed from a fruit or two, or cull heavily looking for a specific disease resistance.

[Cole_Robbie]

A 6" Rockwool cube will grow plants the size of a small tree, provided it gets almost a constant drip of salt based nutrients. It just takes a lot of water and fertilizer. Unfortunately those systems are usually run to waste and not very efficient.

[bower]

I usually start my plants in beer cups, and I've had plenty of 'extras' over the years that got potted up late or never. I've had the pleasure of seeing a crazy vigorous plant put its root right through the cup and down into the dirt it was resting on. Also, on rare occasions, I had seedlings that actually set fruit while in the cup. This is a very rare sight and the plants are highly favored for the determination to set a fruit with scarce resources, even though they were 'deselected' at an earlier stage.
If I wanted to select for vigor, I would start my plants in cups as usual for the six week advance on plantout. Then I would make a cluster of plants in cups on top of that half gallon pot. As many as I can fit. I would only water not fertilize. I would not prune or stunt them in any other way but let them compete. The really vigorous plant(s) will force a root through the cup and down into the ground. The most vigorous top will outgrow the others in competition for light.
Thus I save resources (fertilizers) and time (no pruning, no feeding) to get to the goal.
As a bonus, since they're in cups it is easy for me to pull out the plant that is vigorous and early setting and give it a 5 gallon upgrade and a normal season to produce lots to taste and eat.

I haven't been able to select for determinate growth at the beer cup stage. There just isn't enough resource for most plants to show their growth habit. I have a set of larger pots (maybe less than half gallon?) which have turned out to contain enough resources to get them to flower pattern stage. But maybe I could try cups on top of a pot of soil, as an alternative way to select more determinates with less resources. It might work and if so, would save me some extra resources and time.

[wykvlvr]

my indets got left in the small cups I use for first transplant from seed starter. I had two plants bloom both Marbled Mystery from Bunny Hop and one of them set a tomato! Sadly dh tossed the plants not realizing how amazing it was. Yes I ordered more seeds of that one from Bunny Hop. This time it will get planted out.

[Shule]

On my first read, I figured they were just doing the seed-starting in the half-gallon pot (not keeping them there). That's interesting how they are getting fruit with ten plants in a half-gallon container. You could transplant the ten in the ground in the same spot and do the same thing probably.

[AKgardener]

I’m only gonna say a small thing that I did learn yesterday here because not sure it it means anything because I went to a hydroponic store yesterday to get nutrients . The guy there went back and forth over our gardens he grows inside in winter as well I explained my troubles. What I learned is dwarfs are great plants that give you maters but not as much as they could because they are the mother plant. Take a sucker off the dwarf ans you will get more tomatoes from that plant. Not sure if anyone knows about this but he says it works amazing for dwarf plants

[Frosti]

I’m only gonna say a small thing that I did learn yesterday here because not sure it it means anything because I went to a hydroponic store yesterday to get nutrients . The guy there went back and forth over our gardens he grows inside in winter as well I explained my troubles. What I learned is dwarfs are great plants that give you maters but not as much as they could because they are the mother plant. Take a sucker off the dwarf ans you will get more tomatoes from that plant. Not sure if anyone knows about this but he says it works amazing for dwarf plants

I've never heard of something like this. Suckers are genetically identical clones, with the only difference being a later start into the season and the lack of a tap root. Or did you or I misinterpret his intention and he was actually talking about single stemming a dwarf?

[bower]

Hmm... I will guess that the rooted cutting from an already flowering plant is going to bear some flowers and fruit immediately on the lower branches, instead of the long wait and vegetative growth period when growing from seed. This is what I've seen when rooting determinate cuttings from mature plants.
Setting on the lower branches would explain getting 'more' from a rooted sucker. (And would cover 'earlier' as well). You just need to start with a plant that's already flowering, otherwise you'll get vegetative growth pattern first as with a plant grown from seed.

[AKgardener]

I don’t think misinterpreted what he said as what you said it probably due to the fact it’s already grown bigger when you cut it . Flowers sooner more tomatoes. I will test that theory but there must something to it but I’m assuming as well by dwarf he could talking about those plus determine tomatoes. I think dwarf in general. He basically said taking a sucker off the plant will produce more tomatoes than the mother plant.

[Doffer]

This is very similar to SSD single seed descent.
You plant many, many, F2 seeds and from each plant you take 1 seed from which you grow a plant. You do this for 7 generations and then you select the many plants, which are now homozygous, for the desired properties. Of course, you give this last generation enough space.
The advantage is that you can grow up to 3 generations per year and therefore quickly reach the F7 generation. Selection therefore only takes place in the last generation.

With sufficient liquid nutrition you can grow a plant with fruits in a P9 pot (0.2 gallon).