You're looking at the freshly pollinated pistil of Micro-Tina, pollinated with grains from Dwarf Johnson's Cherry. If the pollination is successful, I will grow this out and see if we can find a better micro dwarf that exhibits slightly larger plant size, larger fruit, much better disease resistance, while retaining the excellent flavor of Micro-Tina.

DJC is an exceptional tomato. It performs better than almost all others in our Texas summer heat. It's dwarf, has very sweet fruit, and has high disease resistance (thanks to being bred from the "wild" Everglades tomato). I hope the cross takes; if not I'll try again with future flowers.

Sounds like a worthwhile cross to keep experimenting with!

I did end up getting a ripe fruit from this cross!! I was able to retrieve 9 seeds from it, and 5 of them subsequently germinated. Today, these are growing in my growtent.

I'm glad I spotted this thread -- I'll be watching for updates! (I was actually looking for an update on the GMO purple tomato thread to see if we had a taste report on it yet, but maybe that thread got too contentious and was taken down.)

(nope -- found the thread, not in the veggie forum but in All Things Gardening)

Update! These plants are HUGE. Amazing that they came from Micro-Tina fruits, which max out at about 6 inches tall. As I mentioned before, these were pollinated by Dwarf Johnson's Cherry. I'm extremely excited to see what I get in the generation that follows this one.

Still amazed at the size of these things. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I'm starting to see some fruit turning color.

For reference, here is what a full size Micro-Tina plant looks like. That's a 4" container it's in. These plants I'm growing today came out of seeds produced by the variety below. Amazing.

dave said: Still amazed at the size of these things. I didn't know what I was getting myself into. I'm starting to see some fruit turning color.

Well, they certainly look happy! (Personally, I never seem to quite know what I'm getting into with gardening, so... )

I harvested two fruits yesterday and will start in on the F2 generation here in the next few days.

The first batch of F2 seeds have been sown!

The real harvest is starting to come in. Got 11 fruits today. I'm going to wait until I have more to make a big batch of fermenting.

Got twenty fruit as of today and put them into fermentation.

I'm starting to sense the possibility of a contest to name the new crosses at some point!

I've given up trying to control these. I moved all the other plants and trays and I'm just letting them completely take over this 16 sqft tent.

I will end up with hundreds of harvested fruits from this F1 which will provide a very large collection of potential varieties to hunt for. I'll save as much seed as I can and save it, and in the years ahead I'll have special seeds to share with people who want to go hunting with me.

I wrote this article recently to explain why the F1 hybrids are so huge, and how this will result in a new micro/dwarf. Read it here: https://garden.org/learn/artic...

Very interesting article

It's hilarious how big these plants are. They are each still in their original 1 gallon containers. I water them twice daily with fertilizer.



Got a whole bunch of seeds yesterday. About 40 fruits harvested. There are dozens of other fruits still on the vine ripening. I'll have a lot of fun growing out these seeds to see what I get.