Breeding New Micro Tomatoes

A while ago a very generous person gave me some seeds from a miniature dwarf variety of tomato called Micro Tom.  I am very fond of this variety and am slowly building up numbers of seeds and distributing them to other growers.  This variety carries several miniaturising genes which mean that it only grows a tiny plant less than 10cm tall, this tiny plant can produce a small number of cherry tomatoes.  These cherry tomatoes taste ok and I believe the plants are meant to carry some genes for resistance of various diseases.

Breeding vegetables is enjoyable, but too often progress is slow due to only being able to grow one generation per year.  Creating a new variety of tomato often takes 5 to 10 years or more!  Breeding micro tomatoes can be a lot faster.

In any breeding endeavor the lack of space is always an issue.  After selling the property I no longer have the luxury of space which makes the problem worse.  This has started me thinking a lot more seriously about breeding a few new types of micro tomato by using Micro Tom or another micro tomato as one of the parents.  While I am trying to build up numbers of Micro Tom seeds and distribute them I am also using a small number in breeding projects.

Micro Tom tomato

Micro Tom Tomatoes are good, but they could be better
Micro tomatoes have very short life cycles so several generations can be grown per year.  They are often used in studies as a model organism due to their short life cycle.  From planting the seed to harvesting the fruit and planting that seed takes a little over 3 months.  I can potentially grow 3 to 4 generations a year, this means creating a new variety can take as little as 2 years (but probably a bit more than that).

Micro tomatoes take up a small fraction of the space of a regular tomato which allows for more plants to be grown in a small space.  Growing more plants means faster progress.  Space is always limiting when breeding new vegetables, even if I had acres of greenhouse space I could always use more to create more varieties a lot faster.

People overseas are breeding many new types of micro tomatoes, unfortunately we have no access to them in Australia as importing tomato seed legally is expensive and difficult.  To that end, if we are to have better micro tomatoes then someone in Australia will need to breed them.

Micro Tomatoes

Someone should breed better micro tomatoes
Micro tom, while cute as a button, is not the tastiest tomato in the world.  It is not bad, but it is not great either.  Someone should breed a tastier micro tomato in Australia.

Micro tom, while reasonably productive, could be a lot more productive.  Even though it takes up such little space it would be nice if it were more productive.  Even though it grows and crops well in a small cup of soil I still think the more productive the better.  Someone should breed more productive micro tomatoes in Australia.

Micro Tom grows cute red round tomatoes.  While this is lovely it would be nice to have more variety, apparently there is a small range of various colours and shapes of micro tomato fruit overseas.  Someone should breed several shapes/colours of micro tomatoes in Australia.

Micro Tom can and will grow at any time of year if protected from frost and many people overseas grow them indoors over winter.  Unfortunately if the temperature is too low it can not pollinate properly and can not produce fruit.  While this is only an issue in a small number of places that get cold enough for this to happen it is still an issue.  Someone in Australia should breed micro tomatoes that are more productive in colder temperatures.

One truss with lots of flowers, this would be a good cross for Micro Tom

Some micro tomato breeding ideas
Here are some of my micro tomato breeding ideas.  I have started some of these projects and am several generations through them with plans of releasing some of them soon, others I do not even have the other parent to make the first cross.

Different shaped micro tomato, everyone seems to love roma shaped tomatoes for some reason, so I have started to make a micro roma tomato.  It looks good and tasted great, it is not as productive as it should be but that can be fixed.  When it is more stable and perhaps a bit more productive I may try to sell the seeds through my for sale page.

Micro Roma tomato - the best tasting micro tomato so far

Multiflora tomatoes produce hundreds of flowers per truss, it would be great to have a multiflora micro tomato.  This will increase the productivity vastly making micro tomatoes more than an edible novelty and convince more people to grow them.  This is proving more difficult as the low percentage of leaf area of the micro tomatoes makes creating a tasty multiflora micro tomato a bit of a challenge.  I dont just want a productive micro tomato, I want it to taste good too.  It will happen, it will just take a little longer.

Finding the balance between lots of fruit and tiny plant, this micro tomato is under 9cm tall

Different coloured micro tomatoes are fun and pretty.  While getting the colours in is easy, getting a better tasting coloured micro tomato is the tricky part.  There is little point having an amazing looking micro tomato that does not taste great.  Green when ripe tomatoes tend to taste the best but people tend to shy away from them so I may concentrate on other colours to begin with.  Yellow, tangerine or stripey are always favourites, black (muddy brown) and high anthoycyanin lines are also options.  I dare say I will produce a few different things over the next few years.

Having tomatoes in the midst of winter is great.  Cold weather can prevent pollination in tomatoes.  I would love to one day grow a parthenocarpic micro tomato that can set fruit in cooler weather if protected from frost.  The genes here are a little tricky to work with and I dont have any parthenocarpic tomato varieties to use as parent stock so I have not yet started this project.

Breeding tastier micro tomatoes is interesting as growing conditions play a part in taste.  Different people have different ideas of good tasting tomatoes.  Taste is always going to be one of the traits I want in micro tomatoes.

Breeding new micro tomatoes would be simple and fast if we had access to many types of micro tomatoes with a wide array of genes, but in Australia we dont have access to many at all.  Things go a lot faster if the other parent is a dwarf tomato, but there are so few dwarf tomatoes in Australia that sometimes a regular tomato has to be used.  Luckily it is pretty obvious early on as to which seedlings are micro tomatoes and which are not so culls can be made while the plants are tiny seedlings.


Where to get micro tomatoes
When I have stabilised a few good lines I plan to name them and sell their seeds.  I will most likely list them on my for sale page when they are ready.  This probably wont be for a while yet as I do not have a garden or yard at the moment so progress is slow as everything is growing in pots and most of my seeds are stored away for the moment.

Micro Tomato Seedlings and regular tomato seedlings, it is simple enough to tell which are which

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Does chamomile have the same potential to cause methemoglobinemia as benzocaine orajel

On the 21st of November 2013 Vashra asked me about the potential of chamomile to cause methemoglobinaemia, apparently the same effect produced by benzocaine/orajel. Well, I always love to help, but my free time is nearly null, and now with a child making me change nappies and feed him every 2 to 3 hours, is ever more complicated. Nevertheless, I want to maintain the blog as active as possible and I am now using a few moments of my paternity leave to read a little more about what is bugging my readers brains. For starters, let me assume my ignorance and state that there are a lot of things here I am not familiar with, thus I decided to learn about them to make a little sense before thinking of researching adequate answers. 

Methemoglobinaemia - "is a blood disorder in which an abnormal amount of methemoglobin -- a form of hemoglobin-- is produced. Hemoglobin is the molecule in red blood cells that distributes oxygen to the body. Methemoglobin cannot release oxygen. In methemoglobinemia, the hemoglobin is unable to release oxygen effectively to body tissues." [1]

Benzocaine -  "Benzocaine is a local anesthetic (numbing medication). It works by blocking nerve signals in your body. " [2]

Orajel - a pharmaceutical used in adult and child oral care to counteract pain generated by infection and/or teething. [3]

So basically what Vashra wants to ask is if chamomile can cause a blood disorder in which an abnormal amount of methemoglobin is incapable of adequate releasing of oxygen into body tissues, apparently an effect previously observed as result of using Benzocaine. Benzocaine being the active substance of the pharmaceutical Orajel used, for the sake of the example, in calming teething pain in children.

By searching the web I came across a page referring the Food and Drugs Administration website, where one can find the immediate awareness alarm to several gels and liquids containing benzocaine and the observed cases of teething children poisoned by this substance. It occurs that benzocaine reduces the oxygen available in the blood stream and symptoms can  appear at any time point [4]. There is a special danger with over-the-counter products containing benzocaine as they are readily available, therefore it is quite important to reassure parents that there are different options on the market that can help relieve pain in children and toddlers.

Hot and cold gel packs mold themselves and fit various parts of the body, septic raw honey (not manufactures honey) is a potent anti-infection and anti-inflammatory natural product [5]. There are many folk remedies available, some might have a scientific explanation where others might live on myth passed from generation to generation.

When it comes to chamomile, it is known to help children suffering from colic and teething pain, but what about side effects associated to this natural plant? Well, I could find a few but nothing mentioning methemoglobinemia. I found mainly four toxic effects in humans caused by chamomile, 1) the normal allergic reaction in some individuals, 2) anaphylaxis (a life-threatening allergic reaction in people allergic to plants in the daisy family), 3) drowsiness, and 4) contact dermatitis [6].

Perhaps the biggest risk associated to the use of chamomile and vascular imbalance is the presence of coumarin (organic chemical compound) for its thinning effects. Coumarin has very mild blood thinning effects, though! Overall, I wasnt able to find any relation between methemoglobinemia and the use of chamomile.

If you know more about this issue, please help us build good knowledge on it by sharing your opinion in the comments section.

Cheers.

[1] Methemoglobinemia - Medline Plus, [http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/000562.htm], last visited on the 05th of December 2013, last update on the 31st of October 2013.

[2] Benzocaine topical - Drugs.com, [http://www.drugs.com/mtm/benzocaine-topical.html], last visited on the 05th of December 2013, last updated on the 01st of December 2013.

[3] Orajel, [http://www.orajel.com/], last visited on the 05th of December 2013, last update unknown.

[4] FDA warns... do not use this pain reliever... you could turn blue and die - Mercola], [http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2011/04/25/warning--fda-issues-alert-that-topical-anesthetics-may-kill-you.aspx], last visited on the 05th of December 2013, last update unknown.

[5] This bee product has enormous benefits for your health - Mercola, [http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2009/11/17/This-Bee-Product-Has-Enormous-Benefits-for-Your-Health.aspx], last visited on the 05th of December 2013, last update unknown.

[6] Integrative Medicine for Children, edited by May Loo, MD - June 2008.

[7] Web MD - Chamomile Herbal Information, [http://www.webmd.com/vitamins-and-supplements/lifestyle-guide-11/supplement-guide-chamomile], last visited on the 05th of December 2013, last update on the 13th of October 2012.

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Pineapple Sage one of the most delicious and useful herbs

I first heard about Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) on the internet somewhere and I was both intrigued and skeptical.  Everyone who wrote about growing or eating this plant raved about how great it is.  I wanted to try some but did not want to pay a fortune for one through some mail order and then find it did not smell like pineapple, or that it smelled of pineapple but the pineapple smell was overpowered by the smell of sage.  I was lucky enough to find a small plant for sale in a shop somewhere and was able to smell it before buying it.  It smelled delicious, just like sweet pineapple.  After smelling it I had to buy one and try and grow it.  I am happy to say that it was simple to grow and performed rather well even in my harsh climate.

Pineapple sage flowers are sweet and delicious, just like the leaves

Pineapple Sage is quite possibly my favourite herb.  Many herbs are meant to smell like something, and they do if you use your imagination and wish really hard, but pineapple sage is different.  Other things smell different depending on where or how they are grown, how much water they are given or even the time of day that you smell them, chocolate mint is a prime example of this.  Other herbs have faint scents, or they have the scent of its name sake but it has another smell that overpowers it.  Pineapple sage actually smells like pineapple.  It really does.  It is not a faint pineapple smell that also has a sage smell overpowering it, it smells strongly of pineapple and nothing else.

Pineapple sage, like many of the vegetables that are eaten in Australia, is native to Central and South America.  It is less hardy than regular sage, frost knocks it around a bit if not protected, and it needs a little more water than regular sage, but it is still worth growing.  I grow some in the garden, mulch it well and hope that when the tops get burned off by frost that the roots will survive and re-sprout in Spring.  As well as growing it in the garden I always have one or two in pots, that way if we do happen to get an especially hard frost that kills off the garden grown plants I still have one in a pot to start over with when the weather warms up again.  It is simple to propagate via cuttings, but they only seem to take for me during the cooler weather.

I love pineapple sage, after reading about it on the internet it seems that I am not alone in my love for this plant.  I would grow it simply to smell as I walk and brush past it.  Water is scarce out here so I would struggle trying to justify growing a plant that simply smells nice.  Luckily it is not just a nice smelling ornamental, the whole plant is edible and useful in a number of ways.

Both the leaves and flowers of this versatile plant are edible, the leaves are used to flavour meat, poultry and other main meals, it is used in herbal tea, used for sorbets as well as a large range of desserts.  The flowers can be added to drinks, jellies, jams, desserts and fruit salad.  My kids and I like to make tea by steeping the leaves in hot water and adding some honey or sugar.  Even my eldest son Igloo, who is rather picky about drinking such things loves the smell and the taste of pineapple sage tea.  Igloo is trying to convince me to let him grow 100 pineapple sage plants in his little vegetable garden, perhaps we will start with one and see how he goes.

Pineapple sage is meant to deter some pest insects, so I grow a few in amongst the vegetables in the garden.  To be honest I do not know if it makes any real difference, but nothing seems to grow any worse by having pineapple sage next to it and it is good to have a few extra plants.  By hiding it in amongst the vegetables they seem to be slightly safer from children who love to steal the leaves to eat them or do whatever it is that kids do with nice smelling leaves.

Pineapple sage grows well in a pot or in the ground

Pineapple sage leaves are a nice shade of green, in Autumn to Winter it will flower with beautiful red flowers.  These flowers smell as delicious as the leaves and are often visited by honey bees and several other pollinators.  We have seen honey bees as well as nine different species of native bees on the pineapple sage flowers, they simple adore it.  By flowering in Autumn and Winter they provide food for pollinators and beneficial insects in a time when traditionally they do not have a lot of food available in this area.  If you can grow it in a protected spot where the frosts will not burn it you will have it flowering most of the way through winter.  This means that come Spring you have a large number of pollinators and predatory insects already living in the garden ready to pollinate flowers and take care of any insect pests that may be around.

According to the internet pineapple sage is extensively used in Mexican traditional medicine, especially for the treatment of anxiety, depression, stomach aches, evening out blood sugar and for lowering of blood pressure.  I cant comment on how effective it is, but Igloo does seem a lot calmer and happier after he has drank some pineapple sage tea.

I have seen a golden leaf form of pineapple sage, apparently it is the same as regular pineapple sage but looks a bit prettier.  Some day I hope to track it down and try to grow it as well, but for now I am happy with the regular pineapple sage.

If you have never grown pineapple sage you should try it. Your kids will thank you for it.

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Yacon Pineapple slaw

I love yacon, it is sweet and crunchy.  I mostly eat yacon raw, I just peel it, slice it thinly and eat it.  We have tried eating it a few other ways and most were good.  It tends to take on the taste of whatever it is in with so is reasonably versatile.  I have even used some of our yacon roots and water kefir grains to make yacon water kefir which was nice enough even though I prefer regular water kefir.

I normally leave the yacon in the soil until I want to eat it, if I happen to leave it for too long the plant simply gets larger and stronger and returns a larger crop next time.  Recently we have moved from our property into a rented house in town, as such I dug up a small number of yacon plants to grow as well as a heap of the tubers to eat.  Being so hot and dry out here the tubers do not last overly long.  I wanted to find a few new ways to eat yacon as I can not stand the thought of wasting it.  I looked on the internet and stumbled across yacon pineapple slaw.

Yacon growing in a pot - it belongs in the soil

I found a nice sounding recipe, then changed it a fair bit, and made it with a group of school children.  It was delicious and super easy to make.  I am putting the modified recipe here partly to share it and partly so that I have it saved somewhere so I can make it again.

Ingredients:
Yacon tubers, 1 large tuber or a few small ones
1 can of pineapple (or a real pineapple peeled and cut into small pieces)
The juice of 1 lime or a lemon (lemons are the poor cousin of the lime, but they are cheaper)
1 chilli (this can be left out)

Method:
1) Juice the lime (or its poor cousin the lemon)
2) Peel the yacon tuber
3) Grate the peeled yacon
4) Add lime juice to the grated yacon.  Mix together.  You have to do this as soon as possible otherwise the yacon will turn black
5) Cut pineapple into tiny pieces, add pineapple and any juice to the yacon
6) Remove the seeds from the chilli.  Cut up the chilli into tiny pieces
7) Mix it all together and serve

It really doesnt get any easier than this, and it tastes great.  It would be easy enough to add other things to this too as long as they are cut up tiny.  I think something crunchy and relatively tasteless such as shredded cabbage would bulk this out nicely.

Some of the more tropical and fruity tasting chillies could also work well in this as they would add taste but would still be crunchy.  There are a heap of tropical tasting chilli varieties, some have no heat while others are super hot, but few are available unless you import the seeds and grow them yourself.  One great place I have found for chilli seeds is pepper lover, they seem to love what they do and tend to include extra seed packets with orders.  Only some species can be posted to Australia so please do check the AQIS BICON database first.

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Yellow podded snow peas

We grow a few types of pea at the moment, one that gets a lot of nice comments from people are the yellow podded snow peas.

I have trouble seeing green pods in amongst green foliage, so I have to find ways to work around this.  You may not think that this would matter too much, but if you do not pick pods every day and one starts to get too old the yield is lowered considerably as the plant will stop putting energy into flowers/new pods and concentrate its energy on developing seeds.  The yellow pods are easy to see in amongst the green foliage, this makes harvest fast, easy, and increases productivity.

Yellow podded snow peas and flowers

The yellow podded snow peas are an old heirloom variety of pea dating back to at least 1860.  It is likely that this variety of pea was one of the ones used by Gregor Mendel when he was doing his famous pea breeding and working out the basics of genetics and inheritance.  A lot of the peas I grow have at least one trait that Mendel used in his pea inheritance trials, I find it very interesting.  I also like how simple it is to breed peas, especially when the genetics behind them is relatively well understood and is mostly not too complex.

For some reason yellow snow peas never really took off and no significant breeding work has been done with them.  This lack of serious selective pressure means that they have a lot of potential for anyone who wishes to breed them into something better.  I am doing a little pea breeding trying to make an improved yellow podded pea, but that is a long way off being completed (if I do continue to pursue it).  I keep the original pure strain isolated and am always careful when saving seed as I think that this strain is worth preserving.  I know that there are a few other people in the country who are using these to breed superior yellow podded snow peas, hopefully one day they produce something great and distribute it.

As a producer of food the yellow podded snow pea is superb.  It reaches five or six feet tall so it needs to be grown with some support.  It is a very vigorous grower, it is fast-growing and its yields are abundant.  Each plant seems to yield dozens of pods even with minimal effort on my behalf.  These peas are unlike many varieties in that they produce several flowers at some leaf axils, yet produce only one flower at others.  I do not understand why they do this or how to breed for more uniformity in double flowering.  At this stage it doesnt matter much as they do produce a lot of pods.  As well as producing a lot of pods they are rather tall plants, so at the end of the season they provide me with a decent amount of pea mulch to use on the vegetable garden (unlike the Lacy Lady peas that I mention in another post).

Yellow snow peas, so abundant and vigorous their weight broke the support stake

The plants are attractive from quite an early stage.  They have a pink/red splash in the leaf axils which is normally only seen in purple podded peas.  The leaves are also slightly yellow as opposed to the deep green of regular peas.  Once flowering has got underway, the stems, leaves and tendrils become increasingly yellow.  The flowers also seem to change colour as they grow older.  They start out pink, then go through purple to end up blue.  Again this is similar to the purple podded peas, but the yellow snow peas seem to be more vivid in their colour change.  The flowers are very beautiful, people often comment that they thought I was growing the ornamental sweet peas rather than something edible.  It is nice to grow something so beautiful that produces so much food, it also means that if you were to grow them in town people would be less likely to steal them.  Once the flower has begun to fade the yellow pod emerges. 

Several flowers and a young yellow pod - note the pink stem and purple splash on the leaf axil

This variety is usually grown as a snow pea, but could be used as a shelling pea or a dry pea if you wanted to.  If you harvest the pods while theyre still young and about half the size you would expect from a snow pea they are reasonably sweet and crunchy, so you can eat them raw straight off the plants or put them in a salad.  As the pods get bigger the colour fades to a pale greeny-yellow and they dont taste anywhere near as sweet .  I am told that they are still good for cooking at this stage, but am yet to try it as they are not so good raw so I normally either pick them small or let them go to seed.  Larger pods also start to develop string which is certainly not something that a great snow pea does.  Once the peas start bulging out visibly, youre better off leaving them to develop into seed for next years crop.

Yellow podded pea foliage, slightly yellow leaves and slightly pink stem

The seeds themselves go through amazing colour changes as they dry out and finish up with speckles and patterns, all different.  I have even had one seed that was completely purple!  I will try my best to grow this purple seed next time and see if that trait continues.  The colours of the seeds are at their most intense a few days after harvest.  They look as though theyve been splattered with ink.  The speckles are at their most sharply defined and intensely coloured when the pea is allowed to dry inside the pod, especially those parts which are in physical contact with the pod.  Any parts of the pea which are exposed to air (even inside the pod) develop a softer and more blurry speckling.  You get to see every pea within the pod developing its own unique pattern of coloured speckles while the peas themselves adopt various shades of green or tan.  I think that it is amazing and beautiful.

Yellow snow peas and their flowers - yellow pods are easy to see and harvest

Overall I am happy with this type of snow pea and will continue to grow it unless  something better comes along.  There may be more tasty varieties of snow peas out there, but none I have grown are as beautiful and as productive as these.  As long as we eat them small they taste just as good as any other type of snow pea.

Some of the yellow snow pea seeds

I do sell seeds of the yellow podded snow peas on my for sale page whenever I have some to spare. 

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