Black Beefsteak Tomato breeding selection 2016

This years lines show how statistics differ from reality in different lines again.

The black/blue genes are linked to different triggers in my parent lines. One is UV light the other cold. So the basics are the more UV or the colder the blacker the plant and fruit. I wish for just a single plant that wouldn't need at least one of those two triggers but so far no luck.

So I normally select for the UV trigger but against the cold trigger because who has cold temps growing tomatoes.

I started out with around 40 to 50 plants per line with 10 lines and selected, as always, the darkest seedlings first, then I put them in the cold house and those that got darker there, got lower priority. The best 20 per line I put in my greenhouse, the rest of them went to friends and family or became compost again. After all someone has to eat/test 200 plants, so that's enough for one breeding goal, a black beafsteak with white flesh!

The male Parent is one of my black cherries with red flesh with OsuBlue/P20, Dancing with smurfs and Helsing junctions blues in the background. This one is only UV sensitive. The female parent is a cross of Great White x P20 I got from Astrid Storm in Germany. It not UV sensitive but sensitive to cold.

Here you can see the parent I got from Astrid with tomates from summer(left) and autumn with cold temps(right).

F1 was a red salad with almost no black.

It got more interesting with the F2 last year but I had to wait till this summer as I have no heated greenhouse space for winter anymore. So here the images from 5 of the 10 lines I planted and had time to take pictures this autumn.

First per line is always the back crossed parent, then the offspring. So enjoy the show ;-)

Line X1

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 Line X14

 

 

 

 

Line X21

 

 

 

Line X23

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Line X24