Tomatoes & Peppers: A good mutation? Maybe., 2 by Ozark

Ozark wrote:
An Update - I believe I'll drop Strain #1 and not save seeds for the F4 generation. It's a FINE tomato - excellent flavor, medium to large pink hearts on plants with "wispy" foliage. However, it's late-bearing. We've just had the first ripe one 77 days after transplanting and though the vines are loaded with big green heart tomatoes, it's obvious most of them are going to ripen 85+ days after transplanting. I honestly can't tell Strain #1 from any number of large, pink, late-bearing Heart varieties with great flavor that already exist, so I don't feel it brings anything new.

Strain #4 - these are real good and I'll grow them for at least one more generation before making up my mind whether to continue. Strain #4 produces very large pink oblate (flat) tomatoes. These are very meaty and the flavor is definitely better than the Big Beef and Ozark Pink hybrids I'm also growing this year. A negative is that they ripen with green shoulders. However, with this F3 generation these have become EARLY to MID-SEASON tomatoes - the first ripe one was picked 65 days after transplanting and they're now in full, heavy production 77 days after transplanting. These are very large tomatoes to be this early, and I think that's a plus. Strain #4 tomatoes are the big pink ones in a line in the first picture here.

STRAIN #3 - I'm pretty excited about this one. These are very large, light orange, semi-hearts and this year the flavor is so good it just blows us away. These are much better than any other tomato I'm growing this year. The flavor is sweet, tart, and "tomato-ey" and they're very meaty with little pulp and few seeds. This strain also has become EARLY to MID-SEASON with the first ripe tomato harvested at 67 days and very heavy, full, production beginning at about 73 days. In addition to all the other good qualities, my three plants of Strain #3 are setting on new tomatoes right through our current weeks of high temps in the 90's and 100's every day. These tomatoes are very large and the plants are large with thick foliage. Production is great - the second picture shows almost three gallons of big tomatoes I picked off those three plants this morning, and there are many green ones still to come. I hope the others who are growing Strain #3 this year are getting the same results, as I think we've got a real good new OP variety in the works here.

As someone over at Tville pointed out, having two of these strains become EARLY to MID-SEASON bearers though the two original OP varieties in the cross are both LATE doesn't indicate that there was a mutation. Between the F2 and F3 generations these haven't achieved stability yet, and in the F3 it seems recessive "early" genes matched up in both Strains #3 and #4. Lucky!

This message was edited Jul 17, 2012 11:37 PM