Tomato deluge

Roma don't have the flavor of a San Marzano. I had to get seeds from guy in texas, on Ebay. I couldn't find them anywhere else. They used to be available from dozens of places. It takes good soil to grow them.

You may know I grow A LOT of tomatoes. This is acutally a whole line up of varieties:

We were down to only 150 plants this year, I told Milady to try the San Marzano Redorta in our high tunnel next year. They look vigorous enough to not need grafting.

Wow, do you do tomato grafting yourself? That's interesting.

BTW, grafting apple trees was the first thing I was ever allowed to do with a sharp knife. My grandfather produced ornamental apple trees with five or more varieties, and he taught me how to do slip grafts when I was about five years old.

He saddle-grafted the stocks of crab apples as a base for the ornamentals. They were very popular from the 1930s through the '50s.

So, you don't just let the dogs decide the varieties of volunteers like I do.

I wish I could grow the tomato plants my father would get at the local hardware store every spring, they were perfect for sauces and sandwiches or just eating like an apple. Back then I never knew there was more than one kind of tomato.

Yep, been doing all my own grafting. There's a method where you splice both plants together, then cutoff after the graft has healed that is quite easy. I'm sure its on you tube.

I'm sure I've grafted 10,000 apple trees over the years.

Karl

Are all apple trees grafted?

Yep, without exception. Same is true of pretty much all fruit trees. Nothing new here, grafting is mentioned in the Bible, old testament.

The exceptions would be the ones that come up from seed. The same with all the plum trees in my back yard.

Is that the only way to know what fruit it will bear or are there other reasons? How are new varieties created?

Did the trees grown from seed mirror the parent tree? Is the fruit edible?

The varities we all know have a HUGE number of recessive genes. So when you plant the seed, the fruit is not at all like the parent. By grafting you get a genetically identical plant.

For breeding, seeds are planted. Even with careful crosses between selected parents it take about 10,000 seedlings to select a new variety.

The odds are more than 10,000 to 1 against it. However, the best tasting apple I know, Ginger Gold, is a chance seedling. Red Delicious is another. The U of M claimed for years that HoneyCrisp was a cross of Macoun and HoneyGold. Us growers knew this was about as likely as a blond haired blue eyed child being born to black and Asian parents. Turns out Honeycrisp is another chance seedling.

Karl

The plum trees are the same as the parents and when the blossoms don't get killed by frost they bear edible fruit. Makes great plum jam. From what I have seen of apple trees grown from seed some are good to eat and some aren't.

With the time involved to evaluate each generation it seems R&D would be in ultra slow motion. I see why geneticists use fruit flies.

Probably the same guy I got mine from . I'm looking forward to next year's tomato crop , I've learned a lot in the last two years . I also found the Roma's to be a little light on flavor in stuff like salsa , I was hoping for a real tomato-y taste and was disappointed .

We used to grow the San Marzano tomatoes, the beans and buy locally grown beef and have it processed into ground beef for Chili. People thought we were nuts to grind the best cuts, till they tasted the burgers or chili we made at home.

I laugh at produce dealrs who try to tell me the '"Roma is just as good." I tell them that they know nothing about tomatoes, and walk away.