If you hear anything, please post. I tried to add to my order and got an automated reply. Then I got a cancellation of a Paypal request (never got the request). I am assuming she is swamped with getting orders out and I believe mine is due to ship fairly soon. I'm hoping to hear something. The original one went in Feb. but then VG bailed on me. I'm sure happy I ordered some things from Travis back then instead of counting on VG. You know though, it seems wrong to have to order Blue Dragon 3 different places to actually get 1. I can't keep doing that sort of thing. Diana

Pennyrile, yes I have had slow to sprout seeds later sprout when I planted something else in the potting soil, but it is usually easy to tell which seedling was the slow starter because it will come up in a different place then where I planted the new seed. I always dump the potting soil I am going to reuse in a big bin I use to store it and mix it up so usually the seed will be buried really deep when I reuse it. I have even had slow to sprout seeds finally sprout after I transplanted the new seedling out into the garden. Your comment about packed for 2009 brings to mind a question. Was that seed actually produced in 2008 for sale in 2009 or is it old seed from previous years that was tested and repacked? The reason I ask is I asked Armstrong if they had any year old seed they were selling at a discount and they said no, they send all unsold seed back to the vendor. But what does the vendor do with it? Do they throw it away, or test it for germination rate, put it in a new package, and resell it, or maybe sell it to cut rate seed companies, or mix it with some fresh seed and resell it, or what?

Please see my two posts on March 30, 2014. Only the earliest of hybrids released had two parents,and both parents are known for some of them. Later hybrids can have up to 4 parental inputs in each breeding line,as I explained in a previous posts I mentioned above so 8 parental inputs in each line.The last one in each line is crossed with the last one in the other line to make the stable F1 hybrid. Yes,there are many companies that breed F1 hybrids,mostly in the Netherlands and Israel and Japan and China,some still in the US such as Petoseed,which does custom breeding for Burpee although Burpee now has some breeders back in PA but I don't know of any releases yet,and do so since commercial farmers want F1 hybrids and preferably determinate ones to facilitate machine harvesting and those in areas want ones with tolerance,no such thing as total resistance,where soilborne diseases are found,which is not in all places of the US.. Companies don't breed OP heirloom varieties, for that would be the antithises of the word heirloom and let us NOT get into a discussion of what an heirloom is or is not,I mean you can,but there are many threads here already about that,no one definition,and I'm out on that subject.,LOL. Heirloom tomato varieties are sourced from many places and most of them,well maybe some,end up being listed in the SSE Annual Yearbooks,where they are then available to SSEmembers. To date I've grown about 4,000 plus heirloom varieties and have in introduced close to 300 new ones from various sources myself. And if you look at Tania's superb data website she has individual pages for about 5,000 now and taking all the ones that are in seedbanks in different countries there are probably close to 20,000, I should live so long being 77 this June.LOL

But it actually raises an interesting thought: For the heirloom tomatoes to come true from seed, they (like the Sungold's inbred parent lines) must be entirely homozygous at every loci. Otherwise you would get variation in the progeny. **** True that OP's should be homozygous for all genes but despite that one can see biological diversity, genetically, within a specific variety b'c nothing is static in terms of seed germplasm. Those with eyes that can see can put out 10 plants of a specific variety and see subtle differences in leaf form, internode distances, etc. (Which means that the heirlooms are stable because they're so inbred they've lost all extraneous genetic variability. Who would have thought that the Sungold F1 has more inherent genetic diversity than Brandywine?) As I mentioned above OP's are not devoid of the capacity for genetic variability. Since most of the many parental inputs into hybrids, Sungold F1 included, are single genes for some systemic disease tolerances, high solids content, the uniform ripening gene so there are no green shoulders, etc., that doesn't necessarily say that there's more genetic variability with Sungold F1 or ANY hybrid as I see it than there is in an heirloom variety. it's been estimated that about 95% of the heirloom varieties arose by natural cross pollination and then someone making selections from that initial hybrid and stabilizing it out to a stable OP, so there's lots of genes in there from two other complete genomes that have sorted themselves out by gene segregation as the selection process goes forward. The other 5% of heirlooms are said to come from mutation from existing varieties whether that be by Seed DNA mutations or more rarely by somatic DNA mutations within the DNA of a plant cell. Carolyn