Certainly one of the highlights of my recent visit to the US was seeing Tom Wagner, and some of his trial gardens.
I spent most of two days with Tom, and while I saw so much and spent a lot of time talking with Tom, I have two main sets of pictures in my camera, so I will split these over two posts.
This first post is on the various lines of tomatoes I saw. Wow, Tom is really working on a number of exciting lines of tomatoes!
Tom has been doing a lot of work recently with both blue tomatoes and blight resistance, as well as lots of other things like his well known Green Zebra tomato and related lines and crosses.
One of the things you may notice in these pictures of blue tomatoes, are the degree of blue color. One of the things I find interesting about the blue color, is it’s primarily a reaction to sunlight that the tomatoes turn blue. So, if the tomatoes have this gene, they won’t develop much of the color unless the fruit itself is exposed to a lot of light.
Another characteristic of the blue is it protects the tomatoes against sunscald! I’ve started to notice sunscald on my tomatoes over the last couple of years, and I think it’s the result of thinning ozone over Europe. This is the first I’ve heard of tomatoes being resistant to sunscald, and I think this is the kind of trait that could become important as climate change becomes more of a reality.
The blue lines are also rich in anthocyanins, and probably other nutrients, which are increasingly being lost in our modern diet lacking in colors.
In my opinion, this was one of the more exciting lines Tom was working on, a blue cherry tomato. Rich in anthocyanins, and well suited for making a sort of dried tomato-raisin as well as sauces and other things.
Here’s a blue line that still has a few undesirable genes… Would you buy a tomato that had devil’s horns? I think this is one of the earlier blue lines Tom is working with.
That is an amazing collection
is very interesting to get know how the development of new lines. One often can be familiar with a particular strand, but we not always see all the work behind it to create it.
I would love to have some of those blue tomatoes, it would be very quite an experience to cultivate them. Also, i think a black devil tomato would be a novelty for the style of japan.
Hi ~fer,
I would certainly send you a few seeds for blue tomatoes if I had them, but I don’t. We have serious late blight problems here, and it almost always kills my tomato plants before I get a chance to save seeds, so in general I’m not a good source of tomato seeds.
The problem with blue tomatoes is the genes were only recently discovered, and made public 2-3 years ago I think. There are a lot of people around who have seeds, but stores don’t sell them yet. In short, you have to find someone who has seeds and make friends with them…
The other problem with getting seeds now, is breeding work is still needed to make the plants nice. If you wait a few years until people like Tom have had a chance to work on the plants, what you grow will be a lot nicer.
This discussion forum has a lot of people with blue tomato seeds on it:
http://alanbishop.proboards60.com/
You can also try Tom’s discussion forum:
http://tatermater.proboards.com/
You better ask Tom quick if he will save some seeds from the plant with the devil shaped tomatoes! I don’t think he was planning to do this…
I would actually love to see a tomato variety that had a very high incidence of horns. They’re seen sporadically in lots of types, but in none is it a reliable trait.
Hi Darren,
Tom described this as ‘something still wrong with the genetics’, but I can see how horns could be a positive thing too. Maybe someday someone will work on a variety like that.