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Tomatoes
Tomato
My passion for gardening is only slightly more powerful than my passion for tomatoes. Yes, I get excited about flowers, especially rare, fragrant and beautiful ones. But tomatoes are really what got me into gardening. Fat, red, juicy tomatoes are what I dream of now, in mid-January. Sandwiches with thick slices of ripe tomato. Little cherry tomatoes that pop sweetness into my mouth as I eat them straight off the vine.
In 2009 my tomatoes – along with most gardeners’ tomatoes throughout New England – were devastated by late blight, which arrived just as they were ripening up. So I was very excited when I got my catalog from Johnny’s Selected Seeds (www.johnnyseeds.com) this year. On the back cover is the description of a newly introduced tomato, one that is resistant to late blight. Late blight causes the fruit and vines to turn black and the fruit to melt into mush in the course of just a few days. Last summer we were lucky – there were, apparently, a few isolated instances of late blight, but there was plenty of sunshine and almost no late blight anywhere. Blights of all sorts are most common during summers that are cool and rainy.
The new tomato from Johnny’s is called the Defiant PhR (F1) tomato. According to the catalog, this tomato has not only “high” resistance to late blight, but also has “intermediate” resistance to early blight. Early blight is what most of us get every year: lower leaves and stems turn brown, plants stop growing, and by summer’s end the plants support the tomatoes hanging on them, but are not producing any more. In my experience, planting tomatoes in new ground (where there have never been any before) pretty much allows one to avoid early blight for a year, perhaps because it is a soil-borne disease that gets on plants by splash up.
I talked to Andrew Mefferd, a product technician at Johnny’s Seeds, who told me that Defiant has very good taste, and is similar to Celebrity, a well known slicer. Apparently folks at Johnny’s Seeds have been working on late blight resistance for some time, and created this hybrid from one of their varieties, and a parent developed at North Carolina State University.
The Defiant is a determinate tomato. That means a tomato generally makes one large crop and then it is finished – which is great if you≠re canning. Apparently Defiant spreads out its fruit a bit more – over a 6-week period, perhaps. Many plum tomatoes are determinate, but most commonly grown tomatoes (Big Beef and Sun Gold, for example) are indeterminate, meaning that they will keep on growing and producing until frost (or blight) finishes them off. The Defiant is a 6-8 ounce tomato – roughly the size of a tennis ball. Andrew told me that it is a plant that can be contained nicely in a tomato cage (unlike some of the indeterminate varieties that can outgrow them in 6 weeks).
The Defiant
I was curious about how tomato hybrids are created, so I called Rob Johnston, founder and Chairman of Johnny’s, who was involved in the creation of the Defiant hybrid. He explained that tomatoes are self pollinating – they have both male and female reproductive parts on the same flower. In order to make a hybrid cross, a breeder has to “emasculate” a bud – remove the male anthers with tweezers or a thumb and forefinger, then pollinate the female pistils with pollen from a different variety of tomato, creating a hybrid.
It sounds like a lot of work to produce hybrids, but Rob Johnston explained that tomatoes are highly productive: a single cross will produce a tomato that might have as many as 200 seeds with that specific genotype. That first generation of a hybrid cross, like the Defiant, are called F1 (First Filial) hybrids. Their progeny, like the offspring of other hybrids, will differ considerably from the parent plant, so if you keep seeds from this year’s hybrid tomatoes, you will get a mix of tomato types. There are no hybrid beans, Rob explained, because each time you make a hybrid cross, you only get 5 seeds or so, making it too labor intensive to produce.
Heirloom tomatoes are open pollinated. That means that you just let the tomatoes use their own pollen to produce the next generation, and they are about the same every year. None of the work of hybridizing described above is involved. So normally heirloom tomatoes are less expensive than hybrids. There are modern varieties of tomatoes that are open pollinated, too, but someone had to breed them out for 7-8 generations, only keeping and re-breeding those that had the same characteristics as the parent.
Growing tomatoes and storing them for use now (I used 6 whole frozen tomatoes last night in a nice winter soup) is a real joy. I will certainly start from seed and grow more than a dozen varieties of tomatoes again this year. And I will include at least half a dozen Defiant hybrid plants as a way of hedging my bets in case of a cool, wet summer with late blight spores in the air.
I accept that growing a resistant tomato is not a guarantee. The catalog specifies “resistance”; not “immunity to”. Given the right circumstances, any tomato, resistant or not, can get the blight. But if this new tomato is tasty and productive, I am happy to buy seeds and grow it every year along with my others. I≠ll hope for a sunny, warm summer, and in another 2 months I≠ll be starting my tomato seedlings. I can”t wait.