The 'Macalister' Tomato - The Beginning

How it all began...
Summer 2019/20 and the smoke from the East Gippsland Bushfires has given us grief here for what seems like months, the smoke often blocking out the sunlight, making a dull day, stretch into dull weeks, it was so prolonged.

My tomato crop had been in for months when I decided to try and cross a tomato plant and with nothing in mind as parentage, I selected two plants growing side by side as my experiment. Nicoleta, a beautiful red fruited tomato from Romania was selected to accept the pollen from the orange fruited Sweet Ozark Orange, so I emasculated two flowers on the Nicoleta and after collecting pollen from the orange, I applied it to both flowers. To cut a long story short, one of the flowers dropped off about two weeks later, leaving just one. Over the following weeks, the embryo grew and soon I had a small tomato formed on the plant. I had placed an orange cable tie on the flower and used an organza bag to cover it, which worked well.

 

By the time the fruit had grown, most of my tomato crop had finished, so I pulled them except for the Nicoleta, which was infected with Russet Mite fairly badly and I thought the plant would be dead before the fruit ripened enough to save seeds. As the fruit started to colour up, the plant was dead and the fruit showing some softening albeit premature, the worry was that the fruit hadn't gone completely red. Now to cut the anemic coloured fruit and see if there were seeds in it, just my luck there wouldn't be. I sliced the fruit and was pleasantly surprised with the visible seeds in it. I saved the seeds and had the long wait until I could grow them, always hoping they'd be viable.

On the 22 May 2020, I sowed the first lot of seed on the heat mat, the new cross which I decided to name Macalister after our River here in Maffra and these were the first to germinate and have been strong growers since being potted up into 100x100mm square pots. In the period between getting the first and second leaves, the seedlings were starting to show how strong their growth was, towering over the other varieties on the heatmat.

 

At this stage, it's still nearing the end of June and this story will be added to as these seedlings grow and produce. I keep my fingers crossed that I'll get something nice.