Saving Micro Tom from extinction

Micro Tom is a miniature dwarf variety of determinate tomato plant, it is the smallest recognised variety of tomato plant in the world.  

Micro Tom does not grow the smallest tomatoes, that record goes to some larger tomato plants, Micro Tom grows the smallest tomato plant.  From everything I have read it grows a reasonable number of good sized cherry tomatoes on a tiny plant that grows to 6 inches tall at most.  Many growers claim that Micro Tom never exceeds 2 inches (about 5cm) tall for them.

Micro Tom tomato starting to flower

Such a tiny plant sounds great to use for childrens gardens, or being grown by balcony farmers as well as people who would like to grow some produce on the kitchen window.  Many elderly people who can no longer garden would still be able to tend to micro tomatoes in a window box or similar.  Being so small means that Micro Tom can be grown in a cup of soil on a window and still produce an edible harvest, people who are renting tiny apartments will still be able to grow these beauties.  Even though one will never feed their entire family from micro tomatoes, I think they are still extremely useful.

Having such a unique set of genes also lends itself well to breeding small varieties of tomato or even using as a dwarfing rootstock on which to graft larger varieties.  The days of having a lot of space to allow plants to sprawl are over unfortunately, we need to breed great tasting smaller vegetable plants or graft onto dwarfing rootstock.  Many of the better tasting dwarf tomatoes still reach 4 to 5 feet tall and are simply too large for balconies.  This is where Micro Tom and other micro tomatoes will become increasingly important.

A few years ago, probably about 10 years, tomato seeds stopped being legal to import into Australia due to quarantine restrictions.  This means that whatever varieties we have now (or anything we can breed from them) are the only varieties that we will ever have.  This also means that people may have some old packets of tomato seed in their cupboards that they imported years ago which may be the only seeds of that particular variety in Australia.  It is important that these varieties are not allowed to go extinct in Australia because if they do we will lose them and their unique genes forever.

Micro Tom seedling

I searched for Micro Tom seeds or plants in Australia.  Overseas many seed sellers carry them but nowhere in Australia had them.  I spoke to some seed savers and they had never heard of them.  I started to think perhaps Micro Tom was not here.  After some of the conversations I had with experienced seed savers it started to seem likely that no micro tomatoes were in Australia.

Eventually I found a very generous grower who said he grew them about 10 years ago and could send me the old seeds, but he could not guarantee they would grow.  He used to sell tomato seedlings at markets and would give away Micro Tom plants to kids whose parents bought plants from him.  What a great idea!  They were so small that they can produce fruit even if grown in a plastic cup of soil with drainage holes.  That very generous person actually sent me the entire remains of the seed packet that he had imported years earlier, we can work out how long he has owned the seeds but have no way of knowing how old they were before the seed company sold them to him.

The old Micro Tom seed packet only had about 9 seeds, given the age of the seeds and probable low (or no) germination rates this means I had to make every seed count.  Being so old I did not want to wait another 9 months until Spring while the seeds age even further to sow them in fear that they would then be too old to germinate.  Being the end of Summer it was not the right time to plant tomatoes so I did not want to waste my only chance by sowing them then and having the plant flower when it is too cold to set fruit.

Having such a low number of seeds meant I had to make a difficult decision.  I wanted to ensure my best chances of growing these and bringing them back from the brink of extinction in Australia, so I decided to plant 3 of these precious seeds straight away on January 31 and hope to get them to produce fruit in time, save the rest of the seeds to plant the following Spring and hope they are not too old to grow.  That seems like the most likely way I can have a positive outcome from this endeavor.

I read about growing old seeds and did a few things to help them, out of the 3 old seeds planted 1 germinated about a week later.  I gave them plenty of time (several months) but the other 2 seeds never germinated, but that one seed germinating so fast gives me hope that I may be able to get some of the others to grow in Spring. 

Micro Tom ready for transplant

This one tiny seedling did not grow very fast, but it looked healthy.  I grow everything organically here, but due to the tight time constraints here I decided to buy a small container of fertiliser and have used it on this one plant.  When the seedling got a little larger I planted it into a pot so that I could move it and protect it as best I could.  Then we had some cool nights down to about 2 degrees and I feared an early frost.  Early frost will not kill the plant as it would be under shelter over night, but it may stop flowers from forming fruit and if it does not produce viable seed then there is trouble.

I have read that Micro Tom takes around 50 days to maturity.  Unfortunately this means nothing to me.  The stated days to maturity for tomatoes are generally days from a 30cm tall plant being transplanted until maturity.  Micro Tom never reaches 30cm tall, I transplanted mine at around 1cm or 2cm tall.  An overseas breeder tells me that Micro Tom takes around 120 days to picking the first fruit from planting the seed.  This means if all goes well the first fruit would be ripe around the end of May.  Given the cooler nights and lowering day time temperatures this may be pushed back further.

Micro Tom 3cm tall and starting to flower

I had started to move Micro Tom into the sun during the day and put it under the verandah next to the warmer mud brick for protection at night.  As the days were cooling I think the plant will grow slower, so I left it in sunlight during the day and moved it into the laundry at night.

The laundry is slightly warmer than the verandah and it has access to electricity.  I have a grow light hooked up and this shines on the Micro Tom plant over night which hopefully will help it grow a little faster as it will be getting more light each day.  People often complain about cheap grow lights not having the right spectrum light, but as it is still getting some natural sunlight most days and the grow light were merely supplemental light this should not be too much of an issue.  The grow light emits some heat as well as light, so the plant and its roots should stay slightly warmer over night.

Micro Tom, such a tiny plant with such massive potential

This tiny Micro Tom plant started to flower at around 2cm to 3cm tall, assuming that any of the flowers work and set fruit I plan to save every seed that this plant produces so that I can do a larger grow out in Spring and get enough seed to distribute.  In Spring I also plan on sowing the remaining few seeds in the old packet, hopefully I end up with a decent number of plants and a good number of fresh seeds.

I doubt Micro Tom will grow a great deal taller than this

I dont grow novelty vegetables or ornamental plants very much, I usually prefer productive edible plants.  Some of my favourite plants (such as perennial leeks or yacon) provide massive yields of food throughout the year.  Somehow Micro Tom has captured my heart, I find it to be a delightful little plant and hope that I can bring it back to popularity in Australia.  I grew the plant in the photos using a 7cm pot of soil.

 I also have great breeding plans (once I have saved enough seed that I am not worried about losing this variety) of using it to create new varieties of micro tomatoes that are higher yielding as well as perhaps creating some different coloured micro tomatoes or some with higher sugar contents etc.

I have plans of incorporating the multiflora gene into any new variety of micro tomato, that way balcony farmers should be able to grow exponentially more tomatoes from the same tiny space.  I have a good tasting dwarf multiflora tomato that I want to use as the other parent in this cross.  Incorporating the multiflora gene into micro tomatoes, in my mind, will be the ultimate goal for every micro tomato breeding venture as it will maximise the use of limited space ensuring the largest possible crop from each plant.

I would be keen in the future to breed some parthenocarpic micro tomatoes which will set fruit in cold weather even if the flowers are not pollinated.  I would love to use Micro Tom as a rootstock for a large fruiting tomato such as Giant Siberian Pink and see if I can grow a very small plant with huge tomatoes. Only time will tell if I get around to these projects though.

Micro Tom, getting slightly larger and flowering well

There are many useful possibilities that simply would never happen if we have no micro tomato breeding stock in Australia.  If you have any old packets of vegetable seeds that you have not seen around in a few years please grow them and save seeds as you may be the last in our country to have them.  If this is not possible then please consider donating them to someone else who will grow them and save their seeds.  We dont want to lose too many more vegetable varieties in Australia!

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Micro Tom tomatoes

I wrote an earlier post on my experience with some old Micro Tom tomato seeds and growing them out for the first time.  Then I forgot to publish that post...oops.

As it turns out I got some very old seeds to germinate, grow, flower, set fruit and then saved all of its seeds.  I have since posted some of those seeds to other seed savers in the hope that this variety never goes extinct in Australia.  I thought I would write about just how close Micro Tom came to disaster.

Micro Tom starting to die, the stick is 5cm tall

Micro Tom faced a lot of danger

First the seeds were very old and I was not sure that they would germinate.  I planted three seeds and one germinated and grew for me.  That was great, but I need more experience growing old seeds.  I now have some 20 year old and 25 year old tomato seeds (that are not rare varieties) that I am now planning on experimenting with to find ways to increase germination rates in extremely old seeds.  If you have any older tomato seeds that you do not want I would love you to send them to me so that I can experiment some more.

Secondly I did not have many of these old seeds (only 9) so could not play around too much with them.  To this end I planted three seeds and saved the other six for Spring.  I think this was a wise choice as it gave me the best of both worlds.  In Spring I plan on planting the remaining old seeds and see if I can get any of them to grow.  Having such a low number of old seeds and so little experience germinating them could easily have ended this experiment right there.

Once one germinated and started to grow, the weather cooled down and early frosts were a danger as were low daytime temperatures which could prevent fruit set or ripening.  I grew the plants in the laundry over night to help combat this but did not have high hopes that the micro tomatoes would work at this time of year.

Then the Micro Tom plant got a disease, it looked like late blight, you can see it in the picture above.  This disease caused leaf, flower and fruit drop and eventually killed my precious little plant.  Luckily the tiny plant ripened a few fruits before this happened so it only ended up causing me to save less seeds rather than be a total disaster.

I decided to let the fruit hang on the plant for a long time to ensure the seeds and the best chance of being ripe and viable.  Being outside at this time of year is asking for trouble as birds would steal the late fruit so I kept the plant in the laundry which protected it from birds, but this actually caused the next problem.

Our baby almost ate the Micro Tom tomatoes!!!  One day Tracey was doing laundry, she walked out of the laundry and when she returned the baby had stolen all the tomatoes off the tiny plant.  She had one tomato in her hand and a funny grin on her face.  Tracey rescued the tomato from the babys hand, then she noticed the odd grin.  Apparently the baby had put tomatoes in her mouth but as yet had not bitten down on them.  Luckily Tracey also saved those tomatoes.  In the end the baby did not end up eating any Micro Tom tomatoes and we were able to save them all for seed.

I was also growing another variety of micro tomato from some equally old seeds in a pot next to Micro Tom.  Luckily the baby only picked tomatoes from one plant and not the other, she did not eat them, and she did not mix up fruit from both plants.  Had the tomatoes been mixed up it would not be worth saving seeds from them as I would not have known which variety they were.  If that happened I would only have saved seed to use for breeding as I would not know which variety of micro tomato it was.

Micro Tom tomatoes

What does Micro Tom taste like

Micro Tom is a cherry tomato, they taste ok as far as cherry tomatoes go.  Nothing particularly special unfortunately.  They are better than any cherry tomatoes that I can buy at this time of year, which is a bonus.  They tasted better than the other micro tomato that I grew at the same time, which is another bonus.  They also taste a lot better than an unnamed cherry tomato that I grew in the vegetable garden this year too so overall I cant complain about the taste.  They were not terribly sweet and did not have any great depth of taste, but they were not at all bad.

Perhaps they would be sweeter if grown with proper conditions rather than in the beginning of Winter and more sunlight (and more leaves, the poor little plant was defoliated by disease) should equate to higher fruit sugar levels.  I plan to grow some in Spring and see if they taste better.

I also saved every seed and only ate the flesh of the tomatoes, perhaps eating the seeds in the tomato would have made it nicer.  It is difficult to say for sure, in Spring I will grow more plants and taste them properly now that fresh seeds have been saved.

Micro Tom tomatoes

How does Micro Tom grow

I have only grown the one little plant, I hope to grow a lot more of them to get a better idea of how they perform.  The tiny plant grew less than 7cm tall before it died.  It was difficult to measure its height exactly, probably 5cm to 6cm, and it was cute as a button.  It ended up producing about half a dozen ripe tomatoes but would have produced 20 to30 had it not been killed by disease.

This tiny plant grew in a small pot of soil that was barely 7cm across.  I had planned on growing it in a 10cm pot but could not find one until after it was planted and did not want to mess around repotting it.

I think that Micro Tom could be grown in a plastic cup of soil that has a drainage hole.  I plan to grow some like that and see how it goes, I think the outcome will be positive.  I also have sowed some seeds to see if I can grow them over Winter on the kitchen window and with successive planting provide some tomatoes year round.  So far it looks like Micro Tom will do this quite well.

Micro Tom flowering nicely

What is the point of Micro Tom

Clearly Micro Tom would not be used to feed your entire family, other varieties are better suited for that task.  It is not really suitable to grow outside on acreage, again there are far more suitable tomato varieties for this task as a micro tomato would easily be over run by taller weeds.  While it tastes ok, it is far from the best tasting cherry tomato that I grew this year.  Somehow, even with all of that, Micro Tom will be grown by me for years to come.

Micro Tom is very well suited to growing where space is limited, it is ideal for balconies and window farming.  If it can be grown successfully over winter on the window it can be used to provide a small number of home grown tomatoes all year.

Micro Tom is perfect for children, lets face it they can grow it in a cup of soil and carry it around and pretend it is a little pet.  You cant do that with a 6 foot tall Giant Siberian Pink tomato plant that produces massive 20cm fruit!

Apparently Micro Tom is used overseas by research facilities in understanding genetics, due to its short life cycle and undemanding habits it is considered the mouse of the plant world.

As far as I am concerned Micro Tom is good, but its true potential is using it as breeding stock to create improved micro tomatoes that taste better, return larger crops, and perhaps even a few different colours.  I have great plans of using Micro Tom as one parent to breed superior micro tomatoes, to be honest I can see this being a fun and interesting breeding project and due to Micro Toms short life cycle I should be able to achieve results relatively quickly. 

Micro Tom fruiting well

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