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Much to my delight, my first attempt at hybridizing two tomato varieties seems to be working. I'm always a little surprised when something I do works the way it's supposed to.
My idea is to produce a Dr. Wyche's Yellow x German Red Strawberry hybrid. Those are two favorites of mine and they're both GREAT flavored tomatoes, but they're entirely different in most all other characteristics. I think it'll be interesting next year to see what the combination turns out like. A great big oblate golden tomato with lots of pulp crossed with a great big red meaty oxheart - I want to see that. Also, both varieties are a bit stingy with their production - maybe "hybrid vigor" will improve that.
Every blossom I've tried this with so far has set on a little green tomato, so I'm encouraged. I've got plenty of raw material to work with now - my two G.R.S. plants are enormous 8' tall bushes with hundreds of blooms, and my two Dr. Wyche plants are about 6' and almost as bushy. The trick is in finding blossoms on Dr. Wyche that are at just the right stage, and I find and cross one or two new ones most every day. I've got six crossed tomatoes set on now, and there shouldn't be any problem in producing the twelve or so that I want.
I know there's a slight possibility that a blossom I cross-pollinate may have self-pollinated somehow, or that pollen may have been brought by insects and the seeds aren't really hybrids. I don't think that's likely, but it's possible. Because of that, I'm going to produce 12 or so tomatoes and ferment them separately in cups marked 1-12. I'll keep the seeds from each tomato in separate envelopes also marked 1-12. When someone here asks me for these hybrid seeds, I'll send 12 seeds - one from each tomato. That should maximize the chance of growing the F1 hybrid, and not plain Dr. Wyche plants.
In my garden next year, I plan on growing 12 of these plants, one from each crossed tomato. If I like the way the F1 hybrid turns out, then I may select for quality and de-hybridize it in future generations to create a new OP variety - or someone else here can do that. At this point, I just want to see what the hybrid will be like.
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