Selected tomatoes etc.

The right hand tomato is my first selection from Sungold to ripen. It is a lighter gold than the original. I planted up 8 F2 Sungolds and 4 of them had the same size and shape as Sungold. These had thicker stems than the others which have a drop shaped fruit. This is from S5 which was also the first to set fruit.
It is a sharp flavoured tomato which I like, but doesn't have so much balancing sweetness as Sungold. I like it enough to have saved some of its seeds. The next one, S8, is going to be ripe in a few days. These, although they have similar shaped fruits and bear them on the same sort of truss as Sungold, are not identical. The flowers were different. S5 had large flowers with recurved petals, whereas S8 had large open, star-shaped flowers. The trusses of S4, while otherwise similar to the previous two, have another set of leaves beyond the truss, which some of the Heritage varieties seem to do.

Of the plants with slender stems and drop-shaped fruits, S7 lost its truss of flowers in a summer storm (what a summer!) so I now have only 7 to taste.

These are the anomaly from the Berry F1 selection process. I have with 2 strawberry shaped fruits which taste fairly similar. I prefer one over the other but it's hard to tell if this isn't because it's so hard to get a fruit from each plant at exactly the same stage of ripeness. At any rate, there's a lovely tomato out of this selection. The plant above has much larger fruits and is only just starting to look something like. I reckon another 3 days should see me trying it for flavour. It sets good trusses of large fruits and if it's a good one I should get decent crops from it.

Don't let anyone tell you you HAVE to buy seeds! This absolute cracker is from a supermarket Italian Sweet Pepper. I've been eating them green - I sowed a dozen seeds from the kitchen chopping board and all came true. This is the first to show some sign of ripening. You do take the chance that your plant won't breed true but as I've shown from my tomato selections, you always get something edible and sometimes a winner. I've certainly paid folding currency for tomatoes far more bland and boring than those I've got from sowing F1 hybrid seeds.