Odsox wrote:The seed companies tell us that you must never save F1 seed, also the seed saver people tell us you should only save seed from open pollinated varieties.
I saw an interesting article on the web by someone who said that F1 tomatoes are OK to save seed from because they don't cross pollinate easy and also then gave a fairly detailed scientific explanation as to why it's OK .... which was then rubbished by a commenter.
http://daughterofthesoil.blogspot.ie/20 ... hould.html
What's the point of this thread ?
I grow a tomato variety called Totem F1 for (winter) windowsill growing and earlier in the year saved some seed from one of them. I sowed 5 seeds recently and now that they are growing well I can see marked differences between them. One is taller (11") than the others and quite spindly, two others are medium sized (9") and the other two are smaller (7" & 6").
The tallest one has one truss showing but no flowers open, the two next in size also have one truss showing but each has a flower in bloom, but the two smallest each have 3 trusses showing and six or more flowers blooming. The smallest of the two has a very sturdy stem. I would say the the 2 medium sized are the closest to last year's originals
They all look healthy and have all been treated exactly the same.
I shall watch them carefully and see especially if there's a difference in taste when the fruit is ripe, and at the moment the 2 smaller ones are favourite for doing a spot of selective breeding.
So the seed companies are right, saved seed from F1 seed doesn't breed true, but there's a chance that they might be an improvement (but they don't tell you that)
Well I thought it was interesting, but then I don't get out much.
It's a waste of time.
F1 is one way of doing it (a way I don't personally like, for reasons I'm sure everybody already knows), and "traditional" open-pollinated is another way. The problem is that anything in the middle doesn't really work.
Both types take time and effort to get right.
The old-style, traditional way of breeding plants involves watching carefully over many generations, and not only noting what tastes good or produces lots of fruit (or whatever characteristic you're after), but that they do so consistently over the generations instead of regularly suffering problems (such as tomatoes going blind after the first truss). When you eventually get a strain that consistently does well, you need to make sure it doesn't get contaminated with some other genes, and it will continue to do what it does. But it can take many years before you arrive at this stable point.
With F1 varieties, you have to do something like the above process, but with
two strains. You then have to cross the two strains together to get the F1 hybrid, and keep the two parent strains pure. Again, it takes many years to arrive at this stable point.
What you cannot do is just throw varieties together, or let F1 hybrids reproduce willy-nilly, and expect any consistency in the resulting plants. You will get tomato plants, but it will take a great deal of effort and a lot of time before you can consistently produce anything worth having. And why bother, when you can take your choice of F1 varieties or traditional varieties, where all the hard work has already been done?
I personally grow a genuine heirloom Latvian tomato, brought to the UK by a Latvian immigrant and grown for the last thirty years in Sussex by his wife, who gave me the seeds herself. Enormous, juicy things they are. **** F1.
