I didn't say not cultivated. I said less cultivated. I am not exactly familiar with the way color is passed on through genes. I guess I should educate myself some more. : ) That's if I can get off my lazy arse! LOL! Maybe they change color to attract different pollinators? I definitely know temps. can effect color. Anyway, when I worked for Kartuz in 1999, he was selling a "vulcanicola" he received from Strybing. If I remember correctly, the one flower I saw seemed to be a darker shade of pink than the current Strybing clone and the flower was near horizontal. That's if I remember correctly of course. But I could be wrong. Because the 2 plants they have at Strybing now are pretty large and I imagine would have to be over 10 years old. So it could have been the same clone(at Kartuz that is). But maybe the original Strybing plant is still in cultivation somewhere in some unknown back yard garden, and could have just as likely been alive at Kartuz at that time.

I don't know a lot about what traits are dominant and recessive. Hot is dominant to non-hot. Dwarf is generally recessive. There are more than one gene for dwarf. Perhaps some are donimant, I don't know. The start you proposed would work probably. Selection in the F1 would not do much either way. Selection in the F2 and later would be more effective. Some use what is called Single Seed Desent. With this method, you inbreed for a few generations before selecting. You grow many F2 plants, then grow one seedling from each of those and one from each of those for a few geneations. Then you compare the lines after they are each breeding true. Self pollination woould be important. Peppers are generally self-p[ollinated, but you will want to decrease your chances of out-crosses, as you might loose years of selection by a chance outcross. Myself, I find there are already plenty of very hot peppers. I am going for milder ones, and better peppers for bonsai. Walter

Darrel, yes there are multiple genes and yes I'm very aware of the work done at OSU by Dr. Esther Van der Knapp whose results were presented in the Scientific American article a couple of years ago with pictures on the cover and discussion of the fasciated genes, but all Marv asked was whether size was a dominant or recessive gene ( I'll say trait) and it's always been my understanding that overall, considering the expression of any size genes involved in a cross of large X small that small is domimant to large. I can remember reading an article about that several years ago from Cornell, and quite honestly I wasn't expecting that result. LOL And I saw the results of that when a friend of Craig's and mine, Steve Draper, crossed Black Krim X Galina's Yellow, I won't tell you what Craig said about that cross, LOL, and since it was F1 hybrid seeds that Steve sent me I only planted out two plants, and all the fruits were identical, as expected, and all were , size-wise, larger than Galina and much smaller than Black Krim. Marv, I don't think there's any way of predicting what you'll see in the F5, from my experience. If you're close to a homogenenous gene situation then you might expect plants with fruits of that size, but if gene segregation is still occuring you may not. I thought you told us in a previous post here that some of the segregants were pink and some red, but I guess it really doesn't matter to you wbat color you end up at the OP state as long as the large size is maintained. Right? So grow out as many plants as you feel comfortable with or have room for to see what you see, as it were. ( smile) Carolyn

Carolyn, Thanks for the input. That's what I was looking for ... someone who has grown several different "wild" tomatoes or tomatoes with a "wild" parent to tell me if the tendency for radical splitting pictured in the original post is typical to those types of tomatoes. Let me clarify what I meant when I said, "I never had a Indian Stripe split open like that regardless of rain." As you know, I only grew Indian Stripe one year ... 2006 ... but that was a very hot summer with a week or so of torrential rain coinciding with the Indian Stripe getting ripe in July. Yes, as I said above, the 2006 Indian Stripe had "an occasional random skin split ... but not anything radical." What I meant is, yes, the Indian Stripe would exhibit a skin split in a random pattern sometimes vertically, but usually horizontal around the belt of the fruit with some irregularity in the direction ... NOT a radical, vertical chasm from the calyx to the blossom end and bleeding seeds as shown in the pictures above. Also, as I said in the original post, "the Sungold I grew and used for this cross only split like this when dead ripe and hit with a heavy rain" meaning the Sungold would split from stem to stern in a big ugly chasm just like what is shown in the pictures above. That's why I thought just maybe the tendency to split open from stem to stern, vertically, as shown in the pictures in the original post, might be a characteristic carried into the cross by the Sungold parent and specifically associated with the interior structure of the fruit ... two or three proportionally large seed cells as opposed to Indian Stripe structure which looks like this: Oh my gosh ... look at that ... there is a skin split right there on the left hand half-tomato right at 3:00 (90* azimuth) ... but notice the skin split doesn't open through the interior wall, bursting the fruit and spilling the seeds and gel. So, I may be imagining things here, I admit, because just about any thin skinned tomato I've grown will split its skin in a heavy rain following a dry spell, right? But again ... I'm talking about the degree of splitting shown in the pictures in the original post. Maybe I should characterize it as "bursting" rather than "splitting." Then I might say I don't remember seeing tomatoes burst open, stem to stern, when they had an interior structure like say this. And none of these heavy walled tomatoes burst open or even split in 2006 and were grown right next to the Indian Stripe and in the same row as some Sugar Lumps which did burst open exactly like the Sungold and the F1 shown in the original post. Here's an example of a very heavy walled fruit that didn't split in that garden. But, again, thanks for the input as it is what I was asking for. Since there are several "wild" tomatoes or tomatoes with one "wild" parent that you point out don't tend to burst as shown, I need to look further into the particular structure of the walls and locules to see if there is something there that indicates this weakness. Bill