Kitchen Garden Forum

I know they don't come up true but I did save some seed from some nice F1 Ferline tomatoes last year.

Some plants I sowed used genuine F1 seeds but I didn,t have enough so the rest were grown from saved seed.

i don,t know whether the plants I grew from some of those seeds were blight resistant as fortunately blight didnt strike. However I must have harvested a least 15 fruits with this aberration although I'm not sure now whether they came from the genuine F1 plants or the "Imposters". .

I'm wondering what aberrations might evolve next next year if I save the seed from these ones ??

I too grew Ferline from bought seed, Primrose, and some of mine have the same sort of protrutions as yours....

As kids we always used to giggle if we came across these tomatoes in the shops. I suppose these days they would be weeded out long before they ever reached us in their plastic punnets!

I still have a giggle about them now, Primrose....

Life would be very dull if we all felt too grown-up to have a giggle.

Dear All,
What you are all seeing from your ferline tomatoes is possibly (and I am only guessing here) due to the fact that they have a lot of beefsteak genes in their makeup. If you look inside a standard tomato such as moneymaker the seed compartments are regular and symmetrical; inside a beefsteak sized tomato they are not. This symmetry starts with the flowers; those of standard tomatoes are for want of a better term "single" and those of beefsteak tomatoes are "double" or more. It can be due to flower damage but if you are all having odd shaped fruit appear then I think that my hypothesis is probably the correct one.
Regards Sally Wright.

Thank you for your explanation Sally. In my ignorance I hadn't realised that Ferline tomatoes veered towards the beefsteak variety
And I certainly hadn't examined the flowers up closely enough to notice that they varied somewhat from the flowers of the other varieties. I certainly intend growing them again next year, along with a small tomato variety called Prima Bella which has impressed me so I will have to inspect the flowers more closely next time.

Incidentally I have noticed a somewhat unusual tendency on the Prima Bella trusses for all the tomatoes on them to ripen more or less at the same time which I find unusual although you can regularly buy ripe trusses of small tomatoes on the vine in supermarkets. Do you have any idea why this should happen?

Dear Primrose,
I would imagine that the tomato prima bella has been bred with the commercial grower in mind as have many F1 hybrids. For the grower having the whole truss ripening at once makes for ease of harvesting and indeed for sitting in trays still attached to their stalk thus attracting a premium in the market place and the punter getting to do the fiddly bit of picking them off the stalk.....
Regards Sally Wright

Well I have saved some Prima Bella seeds this year so will experiment with them next year, as well as the original F1 ones, and see what differences, if any emerge.