[tomato] Charles Rick's collection
Thoswagner@aol.com (Tomato@GlobalGarden.com)
Sun, 12 Sep 1999 00:41:03 EDT
I was emailing Doreen privately about Dr. Rick's tomatoes at Davis,
California. I related to Doreen that I try to visit the greenhouse/field
plantings to gather insight to breeding material for my breeding program.
Much of the wild species there are difficult to use directly with cultivated
tomatoes. Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium is one exception and I took note of
one vine that had ripe sweet tomatoes of 1 cm or less. The L. hirsutum were
fruitless in the field but very attractive vines. In the greenhouse, the
same lines had to be sib mated to form fruit. I made field notes of
esculentum types with neat mutations that I wanted for my heirloom breeding.
The wild tomato species that I observed were:
L. cheesmanii
L. chilense
L. chmielewskii
L. hirsutum
L. parviflorum
L. pennellii
L. peruvianum
L. pimpinellifolium
S. juglandifolium
S. lycopersicoides
S. ochranthum
S. sitiens
I was impressed with several years old plants of S. ochrnthum and L.
hirsutum. They looked like trees. I was telling the young lady in charge of
the one greenhouse that both make great root stalks in grafting to esculentum
cuttings. I could keep the plants going for years here in the southern San
Joaquin Valley. All that one would need to do is to prune back to a nub each
fall like grape vines. The root stalks should live for many years if the
frost is not bad, or protected somewhat.