Hey FBB: Don't feel bad, it happens to me to a varying extent every year. My extols me to hill the corn every year. She thinks that it will produce more prop roots thereby minimizing the lodging. I agree with her about causing greater prop root formation but, still I get blowdown. The reasons I don't like hilling: 1) it is alot of physical work 2) it doesn't seem to stop the lodging 3) I have to flatten the hills back out in the fall (more work). However, this year, in order to reduce the labor I used my tiller to loosen about an inch of soil on both sides of each row and hilled the plants with the easy to move soil. It made hills about 8" tall around the plants. We had 3" of rain wind and pea sized hail Monday evening over a 2 hour period and my corn is still standing. HURRAY! I'm looking forward to picking standing like a homo sapiens rather than a gorilla this year. There may be another benefit to hilling. For the 1st time ever, I have corn root worms. Having the extra roots that formed from hilling may have saved me from serious losses from the worm s the plants may have grew new roots faster than the worms could kill them. About 5% of my plants fell over and shriveled which is how I discovered the (very late in the season) worms.

I don't know - that long cucumber looked pretty heavy. But that same site also has a page with the Largest Organic Cucumber at 28 pounds. This Cucumber FAQ says the record is 59 pounds, Australia, 1988. No other details or picture. This page of records lists the grower as Mrs. Eileen Chappel. 59 pounds. And you thought there wasn't much competition!

If that man in the picture posted near the beginning of this thread by korney19 on July 4th is Gordon Graham, he sure looks like a friendly and nice person to me. I think it's great that someone that cheerful and friendly looking was the person who ended up with the world record for a giant tomato. I seriously doubt that anyone will match or beat the 7 pound, 12 ounce world record. That's really a freakishly huge tomato. If it can be done though, it makes sense that it will be done most likely with a tomato plant with the same genes. So it's really nice that Dr. Meisner is offering to help people who get a kick out of growing gigantic tomatoes by offering them seeds descended from Gordon Graham's monster tomato.

So it was stable, until it wasn't stable, for the reason I just gave. I win. LOL That stealthy lubadub seems to have gone *poof*, I'd consult with him before even conceding Love-15 since he is more fun than me LOL! I think in order to judge the merits of "Big Zac F1" as a cultivar; we need to compare opinions on what constitutes a cultivar. It can be subjective and perhaps with heirlooms much more so, but now we are asking about traits that result from inbred parent lines. That the seeds were an F1 cross certainly is reasonable acknowledgment. However, anecdotal reports of “Minnie’s friends” are not sufficient proof IMO, that Big Zac F1 ever was a hybrid cultivar. To know that for sure, IMHO, we would have to have a record of the breeding of both parents to form stable inbred parent lines such that when crossed they always gave a vigorous seed and always had the same combination of characteristics to clearly define the seed plant characteristics every time in terms of its characteristics not limited to consistent fused blossoming and vigor. Porterhouse is probably a good example of a hybrid in this sense. If you mean to say that our heronie Ms. Zaccaria worked on both parent lines and Big Zac F1 was not drifting this or that way then I'll readily concede in straight sets. I vaguely recall as an armchair blabbing analyst who was off somewhere in the tropical jungles when this whole thing went down, a somewhat different version: That she simply crossed two heirlooms and used that as her F1 and little by little improved it, which I assume was via the parent lines. I would need more than a a few friends waving their arms calling this a quality F1 hybrid that always performed "the same" There is a limit to how much "in-variety genetic diversity" there can be, and everything may not be recognized as a cull when this is done in a home garden. At some point you need to say the genetic diversity did not justify calling it a stable F1 hybrid, and you are just dealing with a cross. Dealing with a cross is great, but the decision to name a variety is subjective and I'm sure plenty of varieties have been named that had parents that later were show not to breed true. The scandal of losing a parent to me is highly suspicious and the loss is hearsay which may or may not be relevant or true. To be honest, after watching the passion with which giant tomato growers behold their seeds like Smeagol's "My Precious", given the nature of the egos in the competition, my only conclusion is that Big Zac F1 was simply a cross between two heirloom lines which had a higher frequency of expression of fused blossoms. I wonder if it is more accurate that Ms. Zaccaria discovered and should be credited with a higher frequency of fused blossoms, possibly a mutation, possibly not, which was still quite variable and requires significant resources to achieve the heterosis and uniformity a quality hybrid needs to give. New breeding has probably advanced BZ (OP) well beyond the F1 from what we are seeing, and they still do not consider it stable (Unless the F* from Monsieur Boudyo has reached that point for a single specific trait). I may have different thinking, since I also believe if the mutation is fixed and a consistent tomato producing multiple fruits is bred, that the new stable cultivar should be the beginning of as new subspecies at minimum recognized as different as broccoli is from cauliflower. Perhaps when my great heirloom book arrives in the Male (smile), I’ll have a better understanding of hybrids ;-), but these are my thoughts as all-wet as they might be. PC who really wants to ask a question about the systemic or not characteristics of initial Leaf Mold (whimper, frown) when I get up the guts to start another thread. and also subscribes to the academy of "it isn't how big it is but how well it eats" though still finding this fascinating in other people's gardens. This post was edited by PupillaCharites on Sat, Aug 30, 14 at 14:25