I was just reading about this today (regarding heirlooms). I've cut and paste info from wikpedia below:

is an open-pollinated cultivar that was commonly grown during earlier periods in human history, but which is not used in modern large-scale agriculture

There is no consensus as to how old a plant variety should be before it can be considered an heirloom. Many gardeners consider 1951 to be the latest year a plant can have originated and still be called an heirloom, since that year marked the widespread introduction of the first hybrid varieties. Some heirloom plants are much older, some being apparently pre-historic. Usually, a plant is not called an heirloom if it is grown widely and commercially, regardless of how old it is.

To be an heirloom, a plant must be "open-pollinated", meaning it will grow "true to type" and produce plants like the parents from seed. This excludes nearly every hybrid. Open pollination allows the same cultivar to be grown simply from seed for many generations.

Typically, heirlooms have adapted over time to whatever climate and soil they have grown in. Thanks to their genetics, they are often resistant to local pests, diseases, and extremes of weather.

Before the industrialization of agriculture, a much wider variety of plant foods was grown for human consumption. In modern agriculture in the Industrialized World, most food crops are now grown in large, monocultural plots. These varieties are often selected for their productivity, their ability to withstand the long trips to supermarkets, or their tolerance to drought, frost, or pesticides. Nutrition, flavor, and variety are frequently secondary and tertiary concerns, if at all a concern. Heirloom gardening can be seen as a reaction against this trend. In the Global South, heirloom plants are still widely grown, for example in the home gardens of South and Southeast Asia, although their future is uncertain.

Don't let the verbiage surrounding Hybrid vs OP, or F# vs Stabelized take away your pleasure of growing toms from seeds or saving and trading their seeds.

Honest to goodness, the seeds themselves don't know the hype and they sprout regardless of the information volume that you or anyone else has.

A tomato seed is a capsule of genetics. It grows into a tomato plant, it flowers and produces fruits which ripen and contain more seeds. It is a life cycle of seed to plant to fruit to seed to plant to fruit.

Growing tomatoes from seeds never requires knowledge their history, it only requires keeping the soil moist during germination, and taking care of the young seedlings from transplant until it is established.

Enjoy your tomatoes, don't be affected by hoopla or history; grow them to eat and share with your family and friends. Your tomatoes are your pleasure. Never forget that.

I don't think Radiator Charlie got rich selling tomato plants ... but supposedly they were held at such a premium that he got a dollar each for them at a time when other tomato plants probably were selling for far less. Somewhere I read he raised the 6,000.00 needed to pay off his mortgage. And I don't think I ever read where ten individual varieties were involved in his breeding program or that he used tweezers ... I did read somewhere that he used a baby's earwax remover bulb to suck pollen off one blossom and blow it onto another. Hahahahaha. Great story however it's been spun.

Mortgage Lifter (Radiator Charlie's) involved 4 parents I believe, not 9. One parent was German Johnson. I think the others may have been Beefsteak, an English variety, and an Italian variety.

After planting out a hybrid, which all F1's should look/act similar, if you save seeds from an F1, those seeds are F2 seeds. Growing F2 seeds often gives you different plants/fruits that can be similar to either parent, both parents, or even something completely different. It's when you start saving seeds generation after generation that you start seeing things stabilize somewhat, depending on which selections you made, the more generations you grow it, usually beyond F6 or F7. We've still seen things appear in even later generations that weren't expected--even as far as F14. You never completely get 100% stable but the percentage of getting something different becomes so minute that it's still considered an open pollinated variety.

Right now I'm working on something I'm calling "Cherokee Bi-Color" from a cross of Cherokee Green and a popular yellow tomato in Carolyn's book. The F1's were bi-colors, but the F2's have all sorts of cool things--the more plants you grow out the more things you see. For example, out of 6 plants, 1 is bright yellow, 1 is light yellow bi-color, 1 looks like Cherokee Green but if you let it ripen further, it becomes almost orange with red bi-coloring, and a few other plants look like Cherokee Green with amber.

Some feel F6 is a good representation of an open pollinated stable variety, others may not. Didn't Charlie pay his mortgage off in about the same number of years?!

I Love Trudi's attitude!!!! After all, a tomato is a tomato. Some better some worse, but still similar.

AMEN!

But, anyway, Charlie comes up with an heirloom we'll call Mortgage Lifter after a few years and goes on to become rich. Sounds like a fairy tale to me. Why is Mortgage Lifter an heirloom and not a hybrid?? Why are any of the heirlooms heirlooms??

Mortgage Lifter is an heirloom because of its age. It's not a hybrid because it's been bred out over many years to become an open pollinated variety. Same for many heirlooms.

Weren't they all hybridized from 2 or more parent plants to produce a desireable end??

We don't often know which led to which... perhaps hundreds of years ago 2 plants crossed and survived til now... it's believed that many or all came from the currant type tomato, but how do you explain big beefsteaks and such? Of course there were selections made, and even mutations along the way... so "weren't they all hybridized from 2 or more parent plants to produce a desireable end" may or may not be true for some/all... plus many were done by nature and not man... not necessarily intentional either. And many exist that aren't quite "desirable."

I'm beginning to think I'll just stick to visiting K Mart in the spring and buying a six pack (which seems to have gone by the way) of Big Boy and let it go at that. Planting seed sounded like a good idea, but the more I read, the more it doesn't.
Curly

Sounds like you don't have any desire to find a tomato with outstanding taste, and a tomato doesn't mean much to you. Maybe you make a BLT from store-bought tomatoes and are happy at that. Why are you here and why even bother growing them then?

If you think you'll get something better tasting than a store tomato, you're probably right, even with many of the "'Boy" hybrids. Maybe that will be enough to satisfy you.

But you will be limited to maybe a handful of varieties... (out of many, many thousands of varieties...) developed not necessarily for taste but often for production or disease tolerance. Are those things more important to you than taste?

You can actually buy plants online of many heirloom varieties, many are excellent tasting, none are as cheap as starting seeds yourself. If you want great taste but don't want to go through the work of raising plants (5 to 7 weeks, lighting on 16 hours/day, etc), I'd recommend just buying them from a place like selectedplants.com.

Have you ever even tasted any heirlooms yet?

Some feel F6 is a good representation of an open pollinated stable variety, others may not

*****

Mark, when dehybridization is done I don't think one can specify a particular generation as guaranteeing the OP status. It really depends on the traits that are being selected for. At least in my experience. For OTV Brandywine it took me essentially to the F4 and I took it out to the F5 just to be sure. With Ramapo F1 it was OK at the F3.
Curly wrote:
(Yesterday I spent some hours reading FAQ's on this site about hybrids, hybridization, dehibridization and heirlooms. To say the least, I'm more confused now than ever. Here's the way I see it, and, I'm sure I will be scolded for not studying harder: As I understand it every year seed sellers go through the labor intensive cross breeding of 2 or more parents in order to grow plants that produce fruit for their seed only to sell to the general public. These are hybrid F1 seed. And it has to be done this way EVERY year to obtain the same seed as previous years. F2, I have no idea.)

The reason that Mark and a few others here are discussing dehybridization, hybridization and F generations is b'c that's what curly asked about in his first post as you can see just from what I cut and pasted here.

No one has answered about histories or discussed the various definitions that have been and could be applied to heirloom tomatoes. No need to since it wasn't asked about.

And Curly's questions have nothing to do with the enjoyment that so many of us have by growing tomatoes. That's assumed for all of us who read and/or post here, at least by me.(smile) Rather, Curly has gone beyond that and is trying to understand issues beyond just growing tomatoes. At least that's the way I see it.

Curly, just one comment from something you said above in what I cut and pasted.

When commercial F1 seed is produced it doesn't have to be produced each year for each vvariety. That seed has the same longevity as does OP seed and if stored correctly is good for quite a few years.

Carolyn

kimcoco, I think I read some of that article. I read so much its hard to remember everything.
trudi, t-bred....AMEN, AMEN.
korney 19, it took 1 minute and 31 seconds for you to develop a burr under your saddle. I DON'T buy supermarket tomatoes. When mine don't produce enough I may buy from a local like myself who has plenty of room to grow scads of tomatoes, usually just one variety just to make a few bucks on the side. I don't, very often, eat restaurant tomatoes unless they really look appealing. I think I have found a tomato that has outstanding taste..to my wife and I called Goliath (a hybrid, I think) which I bought two plants at a flea market in Texas. I nurtured, coddled and pleaded with them to keep healthy for the trip home to MO. They did, but the growing season here this year is about the worst I've seen, and they didn't flourish. Just recently they started putting on some more fruit. I got about 3 or 4 good size toms in July (one 12 oz).
carolyn, carolyn, carolyn. Every where I look and read I see your name. I can only assume you have a doctorate in tomatoes, whilst I am still in tom101. The ony plants I grow are tomatoes and bell peppers. I don't really baby the peppers so they grow like wildfire and produce like rabbits. I've enjoyed growing plants from seed for a long time without knowing what the F's meant. I always have bought seeds from a catalog. This is the first year I've saved some seeds for next year (and that is a whole new ball of wax.) My problem is I think I've waited too long in life to see and F6's mature!

Thanks to all for comments. I do like to grow toms from seed and do enjoy different tastes. I just wanted to get an insight on the F's and heirlooms.

Before we determine whether a tomato qualifies as a candidate for heirloom, it seems like we need to define open pollinated as it relates to a truly stabilized, nearly 100% homozygotous cultivar. Or on the other hand are are we using open pollinated to describe something someone has taken only to three, four or five generations from hybrid and simply declared that it appears stable for one or two traits like the tomato color or shape.

As I understand it, an F1 hybrid has 100% heterozygotous gene pairs, half of the genes from one parent and half from the other. At F2, a tomato plant has 50% heterozygotous and 50% homozygotous gene pairs and is very unstable even if it's a plant that replicates a tomato that looks very much like the tomato on the F1 hybrid.

At F3, the tomato plant is still 25% heterozygotous and can hardly be called open pollinated as it still has potential to continue segregating gene pairs for several more generations regardless of it's outward physical appearance. At F4 the plant is 87.5% homo. to 12.5 hetero., at F5 it's 93.75% homo. to 6.25% hetero., and at F6 it's 96.875% homo. to 3.125% hetero. and still segregating.

There seems to be valid basis why some people consider a tomato cultivar isn't sufficiently segregated to be called stable until F7 when the homozygotous gene pairs finally reach about 98%. Of course a tomato cultivar may replicate the desired traits for which it was selected by an individual grower at some stage far earlier than F6 or F7, but can it really be considered fully stable for all traits it may manifest.

So what defines open pollinated? It's an important question since most definitions given for heirloom include the requirement that the variety be open pollinated.

A penny for your thoughts.

So what defines open pollinated? It's an important question since most definitions given for heirloom include the requirement that the variety be open pollinated.

*****

All that you said about the % heterozygous vs homozygous at succeeding generations is true.

But when a hybrid is being dehybrtidized it really depends on what the origin of the hybrid is.

Maybe around 90% of most of what we call heirlooms were developed from accidental cross pollinations and someone saw something in the grow outs that appealed to them and they chose that plant, that fruit, to try and genetically dehybridize it.

So in doing that certain visual and taste observations were made and when all seeds saved at a certain F generation gave rise to the exact same selected original then one can call it OP. That was the case when I dehybridized what we now know as OTV Brandywine which originated from a natural cross between Yellow Brandywine and an unknown pollen parent.

If one is dehybridizing a known F1 hybrid the situation isn't all that different, in that it's visual and taste observations that determine how far out one goes to get a stable OP. When I dehybridized Ramapo F1 it looked good at the F3 and so it was actually F2 and F3 seeds that I distributed and I know many folks who are now on the F5 and F6 and it's maintained its genetic stability in terms of visual and taste traits selected for. And in this case I had F1 plants for comparison sake.

I don't think that one can equate the degree of hetero or homo zygosity at a particular F generation with visual and taste traits selected for. Surely most of our OP
s are still heterozygous for some traits not known and/or not selected for. I'd have to go check some gene pairs to give examples of known heterozygosity in OP's, but PL/RL leaf form is one of them where the heterozygous condition apparently exists altho some would not agree with that based on just a change in a variety from RL to PL/ But there are several other gene pairs that also can exist in OP's in the heterozygous state. So full homozygosity cannot, in my opinion, be a requirement of the genetically stable OP state.

In summary I guess I'd say that a variety being worked with is OP when all seeds tested at a particular generation show the visual and taste attributes of what was selected for.

Carolyn, and I think I know you pennyrile. ( smile)

In addition to their long history of use, the heirloom vegetables that are routinely grown from seed are open-pollinated, meaning that they set seed "naturally," often aided by wind, rain, or pollinating insects, and can thus be renewed by sowing the seeds harvested from each generation of plants. Known also as standard or non-hybrid, open-pollinated varieties tend to be stable and true-breeding. They differ from F1 hybrids, which in usual practice result from deliberate crossing of two distinct, highly inbred parent lines. (The term "F1" to describe the hybrid offspring indicates the "first filial" generation, with respect to the parent lines.)

etc, etc. See link for full text

Here is a link that might be useful: Source

"don't be affected by hoopla or history"

I love hoopla AND history.

Not into a 'tomato is a tomato' at all. Wouldn't be happy with a pack of unmarked and mixed up seeds. I want to know what I am 'supposedly' growing, whether it is an heirloom or hybrid.

Trudi's source give alot of information on the attraction and importance of sustaining heirloom varieties.

But to each his own--pretty dull world if we all followed the same drummer.

First, I tried to answer the question about the definition of OP using the same genetic terms that pennyrile used.

So that's an attempt to defione an OP based on genetic issues alone.

What Trudi posted is a definition based more on a functional basis.

Here's what Trudi quoted from her source:

(In addition to their long history of use, the heirloom vegetables that are routinely grown from seed are open-pollinated, meaning that they set seed "naturally," often aided by wind, rain, or pollinating insects, and can thus be renewed by sowing the seeds harvested from each generation of plants. Known also as standard or non-hybrid, open-pollinated varieties tend to be stable and true-breeding. They differ from F1 hybrids, which in usual practice result from deliberate crossing of two distinct, highly inbred parent lines. (The term "F1" to describe the hybrid offspring indicates the "first filial" generation, with respect to the parent lines.))

Trudi, I know that definition well and used to use it when asked, but a couple of things about it started bothering me.

(are open-pollinated, meaning that they set seed "naturally," often aided by wind, rain, or pollinating insects, and can thus be renewed by sowing the seeds harvested from each generation of plants. Known also as standard or non-hybrid, open-pollinated varieties tend to be stable and true-breeding.)

Possible Problem #1; if cross pollinated by pollinating insects a variety is no longer genetically stable, as in true brreding.

Possible Problem #2; nothing was said about spontaneous mutations which can also alter varieties.

Possible Problem #3. What about all the varieties that were bred by individuals and done so deliberately? Would then one still consider all of TOm Wagner's varieties such as Green Zebra, Green Grape, Elberta Girl and on and on, as OP's b'c they didn't come about via natural means?

Same comment for all of the ones bred by joe Bratka such as Snow White, Super Snow White, Ghost, Rabbit, Marizol Purple, aka Marizol Bratka, and all the Sara thises and that's that he bred. Since they were bred are they to be considered OP?
s

And what about all the ones bred by Joe's father, such as Box Car Willie, Mule Team, Red Barn, Great Divide and Pasture. Are they OP's using the "natural" definition?

And there are more examples.

( They differ from F1 hybrids, which in usual practice result from deliberate crossing of two distinct, highly inbred parent lines. (The term "F1" to describe the hybrid offspring indicates the "first filial" generation, with respect to the parent lines.))

The purpose here is to produce F1 seed for sale whereas the deliberate crosses made by Tom Wagner, Joe Bratka, his father, Tad Smith and others is not to produce F1 seed, rather, to dehybridize the F1's that they create to develop OP's from selections at the F2, F3, level, for instance.

I guess what I'm saying is that I've know that functional definition of OP for a long time and that goes back to the late 80's.

But in more recent years we do have lots of folks making their own crosses, so it seems maybe a bit problematic now to say that an OP can only arise by natural means, forgetting the comment about X pollination by insects.

Just something to think about.

Carolyn

If nothing else, I now know what F2 means.

If nothing else, I now know what F2 means.

*****

Way to go. LOL

And don't be so shy b'c by now you should know a heck of a lot more than what F2 means. I mean you can now advance to F3 and all else. LOL

Carolyn

Farkee, I wasn't trying to sound ignorant as to my comment of a tomato just being a tomato. I just think some newer growers get caught up in the "what's correct" I completely agree with you regarding "different" I grow heirlooms as well as hybrids but the best came from a "grocery store" tomato my then 5 year old daughter wanted to plant the seeds from.Six years later and many changes, it's still the best tomato to her-no drummer here.

Hi, I was just reading this and I was wondering...what if you had two heirloom op's. Both are supposed to come true from seed. Can they crosspollinate, either on purpose or if they were planted right next to eachother? what would happen? And also I was reading an above post, saying that they have F1 seeds for commercial use, etc, that they don't have to be bred every year, b/c seeds last a long time. Are they ever going to run out of seeds?

YOU GUYS "ROCK!" What I am about to say may seem "odd" to you guys...but this is very interesting. To a novice such as myself, I am blown away by the science and dedication people put into their seeds, plants and fruit.

I have just recently found this site (and other veggie forums) in the last several months. I have not posted...put I have been getting an education!

I know a lot of you guys have probably been raising your own varities (all veggies) from seeds and have been cross polinating / breeding varities for years. Until recently I didn't have a clue what heirloom's were.

Please do not crucify me for saying this, but I thought everyone but grandpa and grandma went to the hardware store and got their seeds! And if you didn't get them from the hardware store...you had to go pay the "high prices" at the greenhouse for plants. LOL

I have been involved in vegetable gardening since I was a kid (now going on 41). My dad had me pulling weeds before I could walk but I never knew there was much more than Big Boy & Early Girl tomatoes out there. That's not completely true...but I never in my wildest dreams would have thought there was more than 25 - 50 tomato varietes.

It is not just this post I am refering to. The diligence, work, expense, trial / error year after year you guys go through in search of that "perfect fruit" is an incredible testimony of the great american spirit (if that makes any sense)? You guys have my deepest admiration!

I will keep lingering and learning. Maybe one of these days I will feel worthy enough and actually have something to say to the "tomato experts."

I am sure I will have the most successful garden this year from what I have "picked-up" from this (and other) forum(s).

Thanks everybody!

Brian

Hey ... I'm old enough to be a grandpa ... my daughters just ain't cooperatin' with Ma and Pa Vic's notion of grandparentism!!!