I think where we are getting our meanings crossed is whether we are talking from a scientific (including biology and botany) standpoint or a layman gardeners. Coming from a biology background to me, hybrid means exactly what I said before. The offspring of different breeds, varieties, genre or species. This occurs naturally on a pretty regular basis without any input whatsoever from humans. It is a mechanism for evolution and adaptation and has been happening for longer than human beings have walked on the earth, let alone been domesticating and breeding plants for agriculture. Are all of these matings successful? No, many are dead ends resulting in weak, unviable, or sterile offspring. This is particularly in the case of animals. Plants have a much greater ability to hybridize successfully and some will even argue that hybidizing is the rule rather than the exception for many of them.* On the other hand gardener, whether professional or hobbiest, may have a totally different opinion on these terms. A hybrid to them may mean only those cultivars that are purposefully bred between different parents by humans. The hybrid tomatoes you find in the Burpee or Johnny's catalogs if you will. While they reserve the term "cross" for the serendipitous breeding that takes place in the uncontrolled environment of their gardens. So who is right? Well, neither is necessarily wrong, it just depends on the indeviduals background and understanding of these terms. Its much like the word "variety." You will hear many people use the word variety to descibe different tomatoes, however the techincal term is actually "cultivar." Variety is its own taxonomic rank below that of species and subspecies and a plant can be both a variety and a cultivar. Some horticulturalists get nitpicky, but I have to wonder if its really worth the energy to get your feaths ruffled when chanves are you know exactly what the person means. Now that all being said I would have to disagree with unequivocally saying that the standard definition of a hybrid is ONLY the result of planned and purposeful breeding of two different species or cultivars and everything else is a "cross" or some other term. Technically the opposite is true. The standard definition as applied in science (which biology, botany, and horticultural all are) is the first one I gave. But again, as long as we all know what the heck we are talking about, thats really all that matters. We're literally just arguing semantics here. *It is important to note that some taxonomists will say that the ability for two organisms to successfully hybidize is grounds for considering a change in classification. This is especially true for intergeneric hybrids. But its also important to note that taxonomists are constantly arguing between the "lumpers" who like to combine different species into one and the "splitters" who like to divide and make new species. Grab a couple dichotomous keys by two different authors and your pretty much guaranteed to find discrepancies between them.

I grew Chocolate Cherry and Black Cherry side by side last year so I could compare them. Chocolate Cherry produced plenty of fruit and the fruit was slightly larger than Black Cherry but I thought the flavor was poor. It was so poor by comparison to Black Cherry that I stopped picking the fruit from the Chocolate Cherry plants and left them for the birds to eat. I won't waste space on Chocolate Cherry again. Since the perception of flavor is highly individual, though, you won't know if your taste buds like the flavor of CC until you try it for yourself. Our taste buds are as individual as we human beings are so no two people will necessarily perceive the flavor of the same fruit in the same way. Black Plum is a really unique paste tomato. It is very small for a paste tomato, so it is a lot of work to pick and process compared to larger paste varieties. I would have to pick and process 10-15 Black Plums to give me the equivalent of 1 Speckled Roman paste tomato, and I grew them both last year just a few feet from one another so it was a fair comparison. I wouldn't compare the fruit from one plant one year to the fruit from a different plant in another year, but when you grow them in the garden in the same year, that's a pretty fair comparison. I love Black Plum. It has a unique flavor I haven't found in any other tomato, but because they are such a PITA to process, I usually eat them fresh. Sometimes if I have just a few, I'll run them through the tomato strainer with a bunch of bigger tomatoes and cook them down into sauce or salsa together. I'd never get enough Black Plums at one time to make a batch of sauce only from Black Plum, for example. Haley's Purple Comet was okay the year I grew up but didn't produce very well (it was a very hot, dry year). I didn't like it enough to grow it again. I don't think it cares much for our hot weather because it stopped producing very early in the season, long before other varieties were shut down by the heat. I haven't grown Honkin' Big Black Cherry so cannot comment on it except to say this. You or I or anyone can take any open-pollinated tomato and rename it and sell it and no one can stop us, so when someone offers a 'new' version of a well-loved OP, I usually am not quick to jump on the bandwagon. Sometimes people who grow the 'new' version don't really think it is different from the old one, if you know what I mean. I've linked the Tatiana's Tomato Base page for this variety below so you can see what people say about it. TTB is usually the place I go to check on a variety that is new to me to see what I can learn about it. She does a great job of keeping track of what's what and who, if anyone, is selling the variety commercially. Some plants that are "rare" are only rare because somebody renamed a common variety....and I am not saying or implying that the folks who named the Honkin' variety did that...I'm just saying such things are common occurrences in the seed world. You cannot automatically discount a new variety though because tomatoes cross all the time or mutate or throw off sports and any one of them has the potential to be great. For outstanding paste tomato varieties, I am assuming that you want the name of some that are available as transplants? That really restricts the list because a lot of the best ones you will pretty much have to grow yourself from seed if you want them. The best one you're likely to find available as transplants is San Marzano, and if you find San Marzano Redorta, it is even better. Both are very good to excellent. Speckled Roman is a terrific one and sometimes can be found as transplants. I've grown Heidi for quite a few years here. It performs exceptionally well in our climate, perhaps because it was brought here to the USA by someone from a similarly hot summer climate. The flavor is excellent and the plants produce very heavily, often with pretty much more fruit than foliage on the plants. I don't know if anyone sells Heidi transplants commercially. The standard paste type you'll see everywhere is Roma VF or some version of Roma. Before I started raising my plants from seed, I used to buy Viva Italia and really liked it, but I rarely see it in stores as transplants although I think the seed is still available. Rutgers is an old standby--a multipurpose tomato that has great disease tolerance, produces well and is about as good for fresh eating as it is for canning. I don't like its flavor as much as that of San Marzano or San Marzano Redorta, but it isn't bad. Most tomato maniacs who can a lot of tomatoes grow a mixture of tomatoes and combine them in batches. When I am making salsa, I don't really care what sort of paste tomatoes I use because the tomatoes are really just the base flavor and the stronger flavor of the peppers, onions and spices predominate in the finished salsa product. For pasta sauces or for plain canned sauce or whole tomatoes, most people I know blend together a variety of tomatoes, both paste and regular, to get a nice blend of flavors. You will have to cook down the sauce a little more if you use non-paste types, but the flavor is so superb it is worth it. The best-flavored sauces I make usually contain a blend of several varieties, and often includes black, purple and pink types. A sauce cooked only from SunGold tomatoes is about as good as it gets. If you are wanting to dry paste tomatoes to use as sun-dried tomatoes, you cannot go wrong with Principe Borghese', except they are really small and it takes a long time to pick the fruit from even one plant because the plants produce so many fruit. As much as I like PB, I grew a lot of paste tomatoes this year that produce larger fruit in order to cut down on the time I spend harvesting and slicing tomatoes to dry. Shiavone Italian Paste was superb last year along with Speckled Roman. This year I am trying a bunch of new ones like Russo Sicilian Togeta, Carol Chyko's Big Black Paste and Tony's Italian, but cannot comment on them yet other than to say the seeds germinated and the plants are growing just fine. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Honkin' Big Black Cherry

Hi Chaz (^_^) I've never done before but... I read in a great Sans. book, B. Juan Chahinian's "The Splendid Sansevieria", he recommend a pollen storage technique that is to pick up pollen with Q-tip, then cut the Q-tip stick (with pollen grains sticked on) and store it, head up in a little container, an empty roll photographic film container, with fill salt, 1/4 of the height of the container - salt keep the pollen dry but not too dry as silica-gel. Keep the container in refrigerator. He said he successfully keep the pollen 10 days. He said he touch the stigma of each flower with the pollen laden tip, several times. yes, this has to do it at night when the flowers open.

Many folks seem to like Rutgers for both yield and flavor which, like many prior F1 hybrids, is now available as OP seed. I'm not so sold on any of these since the cost of F1 seed is insignificant if you get outstanding yields. When you ponder the yield advantage of a variety that may be $1 per seed a single days harvest may offset that seed cost. You may ask for hard supporting evidence and I can't give you any. I just know that some F1 varieties are well worth the seed cost for me. Similarly, for your second q, I believe flavor is somewhat improved by prolific production, at least within any single variety. The faster the time that a tomato takes to produce ripe fruit the better the flavor. High concentrations of sunlight reaching the plant speed photosynthesis, resulting in higher sugar levels throughout the plant and fruit. Higher heat speeds the ripening process. The plant as viewed like as factory is most efficient when every facet is working at peak levels and then is when the final product is at its best. I use greenhouse for season extension and I can tell from tasting experience that fall ripened tomatoes, from the same plants as summer picked, just don't have the same flavor. Those fruits take longer to ripen than the fruits of peak summer production. By that time some plants have been producing for 5 months and some are barely producing at all. When those "slackers" finally crank out a ripe tomato it has the same comparative loss for flavor as any other variety.