Last year I planted out 80 varieties of tomatoes in close proximity. I chose “early,” “northern,” and “short season” varieties. Plus some exserted and wild types. I’m in zone 6b, NJ, USA.
The seeds I collected are a mix from all the plants that produced (which was most of them). I collected more seeds from the ones that tasted good and didn’t split. And if we’re lucky, there may be some f1s in there
If you are interested in receiving a packet of my mixed tomato seeds, please email me at devonaviola@gmail.com.
Super-cool! My son went to Bear Tavern Elementary right near you for the first grade (he was there on 9/11) and then moved to Stonybrook when that opened. I worked at the ‘Hopewell’ campus of Bristol-Myers Squibb which they sold and seems to now be called the Princeton West Innovation Campus.
William Schlegel, I recall you recommended some of them to me.
Off the top of my head, it includes your exserted orange and exserted tiger, a few individuals from Lofthouse wildling panoramous, pinkfarbene wildtomate, I think one of them was just labeled “galapagos wild tomato” or something like that… I have all the seed envelopes in case some day I decide I need to know what they all were
I keep all my old seed envelopes for the same reason! It seems like an easy way to keep the information without going to much bother over recording it.
This sounds like an awesome grex. What kinds of flavors were you selecting for?
I’ve thought about doing something similar with all my accumulated tomato seed but weighting the grex much heavily towards the exserted and wild types. Which might just happen naturally because I have so much saved seed from those. However, I have also learned that Tomato seed lives about 14 years so it isn’t urgent to use it up. My first year I think I only had about 70 kinds but that included some from Joseph so it was really more. Last year I tried and failed to grow everything for seed increase. Too much! I think I have about 280 distinct things at last count and I haven’t counted in awhile. I made a list to plant yesterday and was proud of myself to only plan 52 kinds… So reasonable of me. Of course I still kind of want to make more crosses than ever before…
