Oh, no! The Bloody Butchers have Flowers!

[digitS']

While I'm just sitting here . . .

Another 10 days:

Now remember, the one by itself is the one I feel most confident of having moved an adequate amount of pollen to that flower. I'll tell ya what, I'm feeling less & less confident about anything right now :/.

If there's viability to any seed, I may just have some Kimberley plants for next year.

Steve

 

[897tgigvib]

Digit, sounds like you tried moving pollen the way I find very difficult.

My way of doing it is basically transplant the anther cone of the male flower onto the female flower after removing it's anther cone.

But your way is more successful if you can do it right.

I sure hope your crosses work!

You actually could start a few soon as the seeds are dry and grow them as houseplants.

 

[digitS']

Leave the male flower on the female? That sounds sensible!

Marshall, my thinking was, "Let me be sure that the 'male flower' has pollen." I was also following the directions from Keith Mueller, the guy behind my Gary O Sena tomatoes: www.kdcomm.net/~tomato/Tomato/xingtom.html

He said to shake the pollen loose and move it using a your finger or a "watch glass." Since I don't know what a watch glass is, I used the digitS'.

That one good attempt was to the "female flower" that now exists as that one green fruit. The pollen was all over my digitS' and could be easily seen. After that, there wasn't enuf pollen on any of the other Buisson flowers to amount to much. I did move several flowers over to the Kimberley because "tapping on them" wasn't accomplishing much. I think they were just a couple hours too old.

I must have selected a female flower that wasn't in the best location on the plant for my first try. I had the best male and the worse female . . .

All of this would have been easier if there had been more plants or if the plants had been larger & blooming more heavily. Or, blooming at all - remember Bloody Butcher was supposed to be envolved in this. The best of the 3 plants, it flowered like crazy about 2 weeks before the others. I guess I should have clipped all of those flowers off and slowed it down. Somehow I think that Mr. Mueller doesn't have these problems because he has more experience and because he doesn't try growing tomatoes in silly little pots.

I didn't like the idea of trying this in the garden because I'm busy with other things out there. I don't want to grow tomato plants here at home because they take up so much room. One thing that I might do in 2014 is keep the mother plant here at home and just carry the male flowers or pollen home from the garden. Kimberley could have had a place all to her little self.

I don't suppose there's a chance that these fruits have zero seeds inside, is there???

Steve

 

[897tgigvib]

Some varieties make tomato fruits without seeds. They like to keep some scientist who gave it a two bit name happy and keep the name he devised for fruits without seeds, even though that two bit word for it is only worth a quarter bit... PARTHENOCARPIC ...See? Toldja it was a rwo bit word only worth a quarter bit!



But I guess it keeps some scientists happy to keep inventing silly words where they get to mix up pieces of Latin with pieces of Greek. That reminds me, have they done any recent restorations on the Parthenon?

Every once in a blue moon a regular tomato like Basinga which normally makes a huge almost white tomato with over a hundred seeds each in its tasty green gel pac will make a tomato with no seeds. But chances are your little Butchers will have seeds.

=====

I won't try to tell your digits to try doing the deed of crossing tomatoes the way my digits do it, but if ya want, try it having 2 kinds of tweezers at the ready, one the angled flat kind designed to pluck 10 nose hairs at a time, and the other kind that are more pointed but blunt designed to help save the inside of your nose by only getting one or two nose hairs at a time. (whew!)

Also, have a nice clean shiny pair of the strongest reading glasses you can find. It's SSSSOOOOOOOOOOOOO much easier when you can see. Make sure all cats are fed and sleeping and there is no bothersome thing on your mind, else ya lose concentration.

Practice removing the petals and the anther cone off all in one piece. Losing some petals is ok, but sometimes that breaks the anther cone. Practice doing that on fully opened flowers...those are the kind that'll be the pollen dads.
Then, practice helping some ALMOST open flowers to open and removing the petals and anther cone. On these, if it breaks up some that's ok. (someone tell the spell check that ok is spelled right. should i spell it ohkae?) These flowers you open and do are gonna leave the female's stigma.
Male tomato flowers kinda like female flower stigmas, and if they are JJUUSST the right size, it'll fit right on nice n snug. The male flower you help do that might even tell you thanks! Just buzz at it like a bee. that means you're welcome in flowerinese.

 

[digitS']

The last of the tiny tomatoes changed to red and I began cutting into them and "trying" to find the seed. Some cherry tomato seed is really small! Kimberley is supposed to be a "large" cherry but these final fruits are about the size of the end of my smallest digitS'!

Inside, they were green :/. It is so hard to believe that the fruit began developing August 27th! An incredible 104 days! I would have thought they'd be rotted away in decay at about 60 days. Still, green inside - I don't know if the tiny seed is mature. Some of it looks okay but, of course, the fruit that I was most sure that I had plenty of pollen for, has the fewest, puniest seeds.

Ah, well. If I do this again ~ and why not ~ I'd better get to the moving of pollen before the end of August! And, I have some tweezers. Maybe, I can get DW to hold a magnifying glass for me.

Steve