Crossing for Giant Fruited Tomatoes

[PVP]

We have a couple of members who want to grow contest size tomatoes.

There are books and online instructions describing how to care for plants and select "mega-blossoms" to hopefully achieve giant tomatoes.

But I have not seen any information specific to crossing parent varieties or selecting toward parent lines that will consistently provide jumbo tomatoes.

There seems to be two lines of thought on this subject:

1) Employ varieties that commonly throw fasciated blossoms and develop fruit with what amounts to multiple, fused fruit.

2) Develop lines with giant fruit genes such as what we see in some of the Mountain Series tomatoes.

Would Mulio and Gobmaters please discuss breeding and selecting for giant fruited tomatoes?

Bill

[gobmaters]

Fasciated is the way to go with this. Fasciation results from fusion of two or more ovaries(fruit) and this gives the large size in fasciated tomato varieties. I am not aware of any record winning tomatoes for large size that are not fasciated. You can get large size in non-fasciated types such as NC 84173, which is a parent in several of the Mountain series hybrids. Combining genes from very large fruited fasciated types with the genes in a large deep globe line such as NC 84173 might improve size even more but the breeder would need to end up with a fasciated type with the modifying genes for larger size incorporated from a line such as NC 84173 if this proved feasible.. This would be worth a try. Increasing size is,of course, closely related to cultural practices and making sure that the tomato flower is completely pollinated so that the fruit produces every seed possible. Since the fasciated types don't generally have the anther cone fused around the stigma, flowers of fasciated types often don't get completely pollinated over the whole surface of the stigma. Collecting pollen and really saturating the entire stigmatic surface can overcome this problem. Also limiting fruit set to the most fasciated flowers(most ovaries fused together) that have the most potential to develop huge fruit is also a key. I did this with Delicious one time trying to get a really large fruit to enter into a contest, but it was a miserable, wet, cloudy season and the best I could do was one fruit a little less than 4 lbs in weight.
GOBmaters

[blane]

Ill be paying attention to this, in the future.!