Tomatoes 2021

[Zeedman]

On the topic of dwarfs, has anybody tried any of the tomatoes from the Cross Hemisphere Dwarf Tomato Project?

Heard of it, but frankly I'm afraid to touch that project. I have enough irons in the fire already, and CHDRP strikes me as the tomato version of Pandora's Box.

 

[heirloomgal]

Heard of it, but frankly I'm afraid to touch that project. I have enough irons in the fire already, and CHDRP strikes me as the tomato version of Pandora's Box.

@Zeedman steer clear!!

Honest to goodness, these tomatoes are AMAZING. It's really hard to get CHDTP seeds here, but I've grabbed them whenever there was a chance. My, my how impressive these are, and all on dwarf plants to boot. And they get loaded, really loaded. They need a stake with muscle. They have every colour, size, shape. I've tried a lot of them, I started to OD a bit on them at one point. But so many I tried were just awesome. I've never tried a sauce variety though, so a blind spot there. But Dwarf Lemon Ice, Dwarf Wild Fred, Sweet Scarlet Dwarf, Dwarf Bendigo Moon, Dwarf Black Angus...I could go on and on. The BEST of the whole series, and one of my favourite tomatoes of all time of any kind, is Dwarf Uluru Ochre. It's described as an 'black orange- and it is a killer for taste. Just scrumptious.

 

[Artichoke Lover]

On the topic of dwarfs, has anybody tried any of the tomatoes from the Cross Hemisphere Dwarf Tomato Project?

I’ve stumbled across it a few times but dwarf tomatoes aren’t really my thing since it’s usually the only biggest most vigorous indeterminates that out run the disease here. I may try some dwarfs in the future since I seem to have found a spot with less problems. My current project/dream is to grow all the tomatoes in the Southern Exposure database. And that will take a minimum of 10 years unless I get a bigger seed budget. So any extra varieties will be coming from seed swaps and the like until that project is completed.

 

[heirloomgal]

I’ve stumbled across it a few times but dwarf tomatoes aren’t really my thing since it’s usually the only biggest most vigorous indeterminates that out run the disease here. I may try some dwarfs in the future since I seem to have found a spot with less problems. My current project/dream is to grow all the tomatoes in the Southern Exposure database. And that will take a minimum of 10 years unless I get a bigger seed budget. So any extra varieties will be coming from seed swaps and the like until that project is completed.

@Artichoke Lover I don't know much about tomato pathogens, it's cutworms I wrestle, but one thing I read about plant pathogens in general is they succeed by penetrating the leaf or stem surface. I see this in my peas this year; I planted too early because we had a nice warm spell for awhile. So several sprouted just fine, but as the cool weather began to set in, every pea sprouting later keeled right over. Every one, and it looked like a pathogen entering the stem at soil level. I researched a bit why the bigger pea plants aren't succumbing, and it's the thickness and toughness of the established plant stems as opposed to the thinner, and more penetrable stems. Apparently some of this applies to tomatoes too. I say this because many dwarf types have rugose leaves (the CHDTP do) - the toughest of the bunch when it comes to tom' leaves. They are very firm, and almost stiff compared to both potato leaves as well as regular tom leaves. Like I said, I don't know much about disease, but rugose leaves might have some built in resistance given their leaf structure.

 

[Eleanor]

On the topic of dwarfs, has anybody tried any of the tomatoes from the Cross Hemisphere Dwarf Tomato Project?

IMHO the emergence of a wickedly devastating new seed borne tobacco mosaic virus, Tomato brown rugose fruit virus or ToBRFV, and the significant measures countries are taking to protect their tomato and pepper industries from it calls into question the wisdom of casually trading seeds across hemispheres.

USDA APHIS | USDA Taking Action to Protect the United States from Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus

www.aphis.usda.gov

And while I realise this article is US based, I was on a webinar series in December with Canadian seed producers equally concerned by and affected by this virus.

 

[digitS']

For those wondering about this Dwarf Tomato Project, this is Craig LeHoullier's blog and what he had going on in 2020.

Craig LeHoullier - 2020 Garden Year in Review - Dwarf Tomato Project research work

Now it is time to dig into my work on the various yet-to-be-released, Dwarf Tomato Project varieties in development. Deciding what to work on is always a challenge - we’ve accomplished so much, yet so much remains to play with! I will start to candidates with names, then go to general families, whi

www.craiglehoullier.com

He has been involved in this from the get-go.

I haven't been following either the project or Craig in recent months and wasn't aware of a disease problem either in this project or elsewhere.

Steve

 

[ducks4you]

My New Big Dwarf trial was rather unfair .

First I have to admit that I have problems with names, now and then. Apparently, DW does, too. Example: whenever she hears the name Bloody Butcher tomato, she has the same response, "that's not very nice." So, we call that one Jolly Rancher .

New Big Dwarf is over 100 years old, we are told. How can it be New? How can it be both Big and a Dwarf? (Well, it is fruit-size that is big for the little plants.)

The worst thing was me setting them out near lawn grass. This was how I learned the local reality that slugs like to hang out near the garden in the lawn!

Sweet Baby Girls were among the smallest plants that I have grown, although Kimberley might have been smaller.

Steve

EVERYTHING is catering to the new COVID market of suburbanites who never THOUGHT to grow anything besides a lawn, and have been stuck home LOOKING at their yards, and wondering what they could do with them.
Many have tiny yards, like condo dwellers, and this is a perfect container tomato.

 

[Alasgun]

Like @heirloomgal, i dont know much about plant diseases however; after stumbling onto articles about using salicylic acid (aspirin) to combat them i began reading. The original article sounded easy enough but all those questions that creep into a geek’s mind began to worry me. How much active ingredient is in an aspirin, what else is in an aspirin etc, etc.
continued reading brought be to highly technical articles, those that i can only pronounce 3 word’s in the sentence. Reading between the lines i got a good idea of what was going on and went looking for a clean source. On Amazon i found usp grade stuff and bought some.
The articles talked about trialing these treatments on Tomatoes, Cuke’s and beans so i did likewise! By the end of last season, i was convinced. Beans and cukes still need some tweaking but the tomatoes finished the entire season without and major problems. A first for me. The Beans and cukes were much better than years past.
At planting this spring all three got the treatment again, time will tell but for now im calling it a “home-run”.

 

[heirloomgal]

IMHO the emergence of a wickedly devastating new seed borne tobacco mosaic virus, Tomato brown rugose fruit virus or ToBRFV, and the significant measures countries are taking to protect their tomato and pepper industries from it calls into question the wisdom of casually trading seeds across hemispheres.

USDA APHIS | USDA Taking Action to Protect the United States from Tomato Brown Rugose Fruit Virus

www.aphis.usda.gov

And while I realise this article is US based, I was on a webinar series in December with Canadian seed producers equally concerned by and affected by this virus.

I'm not sure that the seeds being exchanged between the members of the CHDTP is casual; the other main leader of that project lives in Australia, hence many of the Australian references in the dwarf varietal names, and Australia has uniquely strict import & quarantine rules for all manner of things. As someone who will be sending bean seeds into the US in the fall, and having done some research into that process, I can see that pepper and tomato seeds are subject to different and more stringent rules for even US entry - if they are allowed in at all. The project is quite a public one, as well as the associated OSSI (Open Source Seed Initiative) pledge those seeds belong to. I can't imagine that they would have been able to continue for so many years if they were violating international conditions for seed exchange, especially in such a public setting.

In addition to that though, I've read estimates that in my country something like 98% of seeds on racks, which backyard gardeners purchase in commercial circulation, are being brought from India, as well as other countries and continents. Virtually none of the seeds planted in ground here, in home gardens, are from this country, or even this continent. That's a staggeringly high percentage of cross-hemisphere seed import. Nobody seems especially concerned at present with this situation, though the virus is also present in India.

But there is also another issue with ToBRFV. How did this problem come about? It didn't originate in backyard gardens; it originated in large scale commercial tomato greenhouse operations, and the emergence & spread is in fact linked to intensive production practices. I can see why there is concern about it, because it does appear highly infectious, impossible to eradicate, and globally spreading. One can't help but notice though that many of the affected countries are world leading tomato exporters. ToBRFV has a high mechanical infectivity, and worker's hands, tools, clothing, trays. etc. are all transmitters. Crop production systems and commercial greenhouse outbreaks seems to be the sole ToBRFV manifest setting, not the home garden. It also poses the not insignificant question, if a person buys a commercially produced greenhouse tomato, plucks out a couple seeds and plants them, as many do, could they become transmitters as well, infecting garden soil (a longevity which appears in the decades) in their area, since seeds are a major suspect in global transmissions? Or even more inconspicuously, handle tomatoes in my kitchen, then go and work in the garden. The Australian government has stated that workers should not be bringing store bought tomatoes into tomato production sites, or pepper farms & production sites for fear of ToBRFV contamination. I think if there is a concern for tainted seeds, it would be the tomatoes (their seeds) originating in commercial/greenhouse operations, the sites of origin for this virus. Unfortunately, there has been no effort to educate the public about the dangers of seeds from these tomatoes if planted in your soil.

The saddest facet of this is, store bought tomatoes, generally, are pretty awful. While I appreciate being able to eat a tomato in deep January, tomatoes are the number one home grown vegetable in North America for good reason. A store bought tomato tastes significantly inferior to a homegrown one, and is much less nutritionally dense. On the positive side, because there is no chemical solution, maybe this new virus will result in an incentive to re-examine the way crops like tomatoes have come to be grown in such a mono-cropped, commercial, 'quantity over quality' approach. The incredible scale and methodology of single crop, chemically dependant production is surely problematic on a number of levels, both plant and human. This is part of why (IMHO) the CHDTP is such a great project. People working cooperatively to create varieties of manageable tomato plants that can be grown by anyone, even apartment dwellers, folks with small yards, or seniors with only a balcony, but who want a tomato that tastes like they did in the' old days'. I'm not sure it would be correct to limit this kind of grass roots project, when it bears no culpability in having created or spread ToBRFV.

 

[Eleanor]

I'm not sure that the seeds being exchanged between the members of the CHDTP is casual; the other main leader of that project lives in Australia, hence many of the Australian references in the dwarf varietal names, and Australia has uniquely strict import & quarantine rules for all manner of things. As someone who will be sending bean seeds into the US in the fall, and having done some research into that process, I can see that pepper and tomato seeds are subject to different and more stringent rules for even US entry - if they are allowed in at all. The project is quite a public one, as well as the associated OSSI (Open Source Seed Initiative) pledge those seeds belong to. I can't imagine that they would have been able to continue for so many years if they were violating international conditions for seed exchange, especially in such a public setting.

In addition to that though, I've read estimates that in my country something like 98% of seeds on racks, which backyard gardeners purchase in commercial circulation, are being brought from India, as well as other countries and continents. Virtually none of the seeds planted in ground here, in home gardens, are from this country, or even this continent. That's a staggeringly high percentage of cross-hemisphere seed import. Nobody seems especially concerned at present with this situation, though the virus is also present in India.

But there is also another issue with ToBRFV. How did this problem come about? It didn't originate in backyard gardens; it originated in large scale commercial tomato greenhouse operations, and the emergence & spread is in fact linked to intensive production practices. I can see why there is concern about it, because it does appear highly infectious, impossible to eradicate, and globally spreading. One can't help but notice though that many of the affected countries are world leading tomato exporters. ToBRFV has a high mechanical infectivity, and worker's hands, tools, clothing, trays. etc. are all transmitters. Crop production systems and commercial greenhouse outbreaks seems to be the sole ToBRFV manifest setting, not the home garden. It also poses the not insignificant question, if a person buys a commercially produced greenhouse tomato, plucks out a couple seeds and plants them, as many do, could they become transmitters as well, infecting garden soil (a longevity which appears in the decades) in their area, since seeds are a major suspect in global transmissions? Or even more inconspicuously, handle tomatoes in my kitchen, then go and work in the garden. The Australian government has stated that workers should not be bringing store bought tomatoes into tomato production sites, or pepper farms & production sites for fear of ToBRFV contamination. I think if there is a concern for tainted seeds, it would be the tomatoes (their seeds) originating in commercial/greenhouse operations, the sites of origin for this virus. Unfortunately, there has been no effort to educate the public about the dangers of seeds from these tomatoes if planted in your soil.

The saddest facet of this is, store bought tomatoes, generally, are pretty awful. While I appreciate being able to eat a tomato in deep January, tomatoes are the number one home grown vegetable in North America for good reason. A store bought tomato tastes significantly inferior to a homegrown one, and is much less nutritionally dense. On the positive side, because there is no chemical solution, maybe this new virus will result in an incentive to re-examine the way crops like tomatoes have come to be grown in such a mono-cropped, commercial, 'quantity over quality' approach. The incredible scale and methodology of single crop, chemically dependant production is surely problematic on a number of levels, both plant and human. This is part of why (IMHO) the CHDTP is such a great project. People working cooperatively to create varieties of manageable tomato plants that can be grown by anyone, even apartment dwellers, folks with small yards, or seniors with only a balcony, but who want a tomato that tastes like they did in the' old days'. I'm not sure it would be correct to limit this kind of grass roots project, when it bears no culpability in having created or spread ToBRFV.

I believe @Zeedman sums it up perfectly - Pandora's Box.