Creating New Tomato Varieties

Tomato expert Linda Crago with Emma at a seed exchange.

Tomato expert Linda Crago joins us to talk about how to create a new tomato variety.

At her Tree and Twig Heirloom Vegetable Farm in the Niagara Region of Ontario, she raises hundreds of varieties of tomatoes.

This past summer, Emma grew a couple of tomato varieties that Crago released. She tells us what she did to get them—and shares tips on creating new tomato varieties.

Accidental Crosses

“One was an accidental cross and I was delighted to see it,” says Crago as she talks about ‘TT Baby Blue.’

‘TT Baby Blue’ appeared on its own, from a tomato plant that self-seeded in one of her fields. She thinks that it’s a cross between a blue tomato and one of the currant-type tomatoes.

Crago says that she saved seeds from it and grew the seeds the following year, keeping seeds only from tomatoes that resembled the parent. She did this for six years, which she says is often how long it will take before a new variety becomes “stable.”

De-hybridizing a Hybrid Tomato

Crago says that a lot of people don’t save seeds from hybrid tomatoes because there is no knowing what those seeds will grow into. “You might get somethign you like,” she says.

A few years ago she saw a very interesting tomato at her local grocery store. She bought is so that she could save seeds from it. Those seeds gave her quite a great variety of plants. “I got multiple varieties; not many looked like the original tomato,” she says.

But one of those plants had tomatoes with a peanut-like shape that caught her eye. She grew and selected for that peanut shape for a number of years. Once it was stable, she named the variety ‘Zemoltt.’