Is Potato Leaf a Better Choice?

[digitS']

There are 3 potato leaf Question Mark tomatoes. You can see the little one there did not develop regular leaves. There is 1 with regular leaves in with the 3 and then the 4-pack behind them are all regular leaf Question Mark sisters. (I should change the plant marker to say "?" instead of "Jay's" - don't you think?)

Grandmother was a regular leaf Kellogg's Breakfast. Mother had a regular leaf. (Mother was also weeks earlier ripening fruit than KB and fruit was red, not KB yellow.)

So. The potato leaf Question Marks should retain their leaf type if they self-pollinate this year. But, that leaf type has little to do with days-to-maturity or fruit color or flavor. Am I right about all of that????????????

Steve

BTW, the photo gallery should turn that picture upright at some time if it hasn't already by the time you look at it . . . there's always a delay. i think the gallery guy has dozed off at the button.

 

[897tgigvib]

Digit, short answer is, yes, yes, and yes. And, the leaf trait has very little to do with the other traits.

In the old tomato maniacs group there were those who claimed pl usually meant better tomatoes. My thought on that is that it does seem that pl plant tomatoes, can might maybe have a tendency to have a creamier texture. I don't know, but if you want a kelloggs breakfast early version you can ask yourself if you want it to be as similar as possible but earlier, or would you like to try to improve it, or accept some difference?

 

[thistlebloom]

I just wanted to say what pretty babies you have!

And I think a few of my starts are supposed to be PL, so I'm going to see if they taste different, as per what Marshall said.

 

[digitS']

Thanks Thistle'!

I really believe that color has an influence on flavor but if this tomato (when it has a name & is no longer known as a Question Mark) has its mother's "pleasant and smooth" flavor, it matters very little if it is also its mother's orange-red. Perfectly fine with me !

The earliness is critically important. Some of you may know what it is like to have a lonely, brief little week when a plant has ripe fruit and then . . . that's it. They come into the house, pale green globes. You are down to pulling them out of a cardboard box that is pushed in beside a kitchen cabinet. They go in a basket on the table for a couple days during their final ripening but you know they aren't from a sunny garden, healthy and alive. No, they are from a cardboard box pushed in beside a cabinet . . .

Healthy is also critically important. You may remember my mystery tomatoes of the last few years. The seed from something that wasn't quite an Early Girl, in the EG envelop. It was a little disconcerting to see those plants with foliage problems each year. Healthy plants all around them, here are the Mysteries on a downhill slide.

Finally, it would be fun if they are a little different. Still, to have a variety that is a good fit with the local climate and good resistance to illness with flavorful tomatoes - wow! You know, they are like friends after awhile - these varieties that I've been growing for 15 or 20 years. Or, that I haven't grown in 3 or 4 years but I bring back to the garden. It is kind of, "Hi there! Good to see you again."

Steve

 

[897tgigvib]

Hybridizing is a special way of mixing traits. Not everything goes the way described by mendel. He chose the simplest dominant and recessive traits to experiment on.

But there are a whole lot of other things that can and do happen. Still, as confounding as some things are, nothing is magic, but there is a perfection of randomness.

 

[digitS']

"Perfection in Randomness"

I was commenting on the Dagma's Perfection tomatoes yesterday to DW. I'd never heard the name "Dagma" before I started looking at the Tomatofest website. Okay, so maybe, I don't know but, maybe this was a Yellow Perfection tomato sport that turned out different. A Yellow Perfection offspring that grew bigger fruit than its parent and ripened blonde with a red blush, instead of yellow . . .

Would it have been okay to call it "Random Perfection" ?

Perfection in Randomness - maybe my time for a little luck is at hand.

Steve

 

[lesa]

Those are gorgeous looking plants! Good luck with them....

 

[digitS']

I have to decide how many I can "afford" to plant in the tomato patch.

Some can go to a neighbor but I am almost guaranteed that they will end up, unmarked and lost in the milieu. Maybe if I'm right there when they go in . . . and put orange markers in their containers so that I can spot them at a distance .

Real tomato afecionados probably have some minimum "grow out" or, whatever they might call it. I need production in the patch, not happenstance!

Steve :/

 

[897tgigvib]

I think I lost track...now you think that maybe the pl showed up as a mutation? I suppose it can happen, just don't know for sure, or how rarely it'd be.

Perfection in randomness is not a mystical thing, maybe it could be poetic, but when the randomness of one gene locus is segregating in the F2 randomly, and another one is also segregating randomly, separately on its own, and add to that codominant and poly traits all working to segregate each their own way...Some folks see that as a study of complex randomness, a statistics problem, others can see it as poetry or music.

Myself, I will never be able to understand how special the biosphere of this planet is, but I know it is more special than most imagine. What evolution has done! Those early things that made possible the incredible beauty, this, well some call it a web of life. So much more than that! The most complex calculus could not even graph it in 3D!

 

[digitS']

Oh!

No, I don't think it was a mutation. I could except ONE anomaly - misplaced plant marker. That plant not only didn't match the marker but her offspring are showing different traits - that's 2 or more anomalies.

I think "Perfection" is a wonderful name for just about anything. There is a bit of a perfectionistic tendency about me. It is inhibiting, I want you to know. I would have been a great artist - like Michelangelo except, screwing-up scares me . . . Imagine Pope Francis hiring me to repaint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel :/. Yeah, unlike someone with a true artistic ego, I wouldn't know where to begin.

I've never seen the Sistine Chapel. Luckily, there have been some clear nights lately and I've been able to look beyond all that.

Steve