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Re: 'Open pollinated' tomatoes

>I was wondering if anyone knows what it means when a seed catalog
>says that a particular type of tomato is "open-pollinated"?

In practical terms, when a tomato is open-pollinated, that means that
you can save its seeds, and when they're grown they will produce
plants very much like the plant they were saved from. This allows you
to save your own seed, rather than ordering seed every year.

This is as opposed to hybrid tomatoes, which are produced by
"crossing" two different tomato varieties. When you plant the hybrid
seed, you get the variety described in the catalog, but if you save
seed from *that* plant, the next generation could have an unknown mix
of characteristics from the two parents. So (unless you want to
experiment with Unknown Tomatoes for the fun of it) you have to buy
your hybrid seed from the catalog every year. Hybrid seed is
generally more expensive, due to the added labor to produce it and,
I guess, the fact that the knowledge of the parents is often
proprietary.

For some crops such as corn, hybrids tend to be more uniform,
vigorous, productive, and more certain to have the desirable
characteristics that you chose the variety for. However, I've read
that tomatoes don't really  gain much benefit from hybridization. (I
could babble on about "inbreeding depression" and "hybrid vigor" but
I'd only be pretending to know what I'm talking about.)


M. Wilson
mart@best.com
Garden location: Mt. View, CA (San Francisco bay area)

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