Nancy Reading wrote:..... 'Amish paste' on the right which grew rather poorly but did make a few tomatoes, and an unknown 'fleshy red plum' which had much more healthy plants. The Amish paste does seem to have more flesh than the other plum variety, but presumably I could select seed from plants that did slightly better or fruits that have more flesh in proportion, and hope to make small improvements in time too.
If the Amish Paste and the other plum were grown fairly close to each other, you may have already shared genomes between them through cross-pollination. In this case, yes....just begin selecting each year for traits that you value with one twist: To assist in maintaining *some* diversity over the years, we typically save seed from about 80% of the most desirable fruit that we harvest from the tomatoes with the remaining 20% being fruits of slightly different sizes and shapes. So far, we have not lost good fruit size over 20+ years of seed saving and by default have been selecting adapted genetics for our region and garden.
Michael Qulek wrote:.....
If you want to have a guarrantied copy that's identical to the original plant, you need to pinch off branchlets and root them in water. Only then will the tomatoes be identical to the parent.
Just adding a bit of caution with this statement although for the most practical purposes it is correct. 'Somatic mutation' occurs frequently enough in organisms but often goes unnoticed if (a) the mutation is not deleterious or (b) the cell in question harboring the mutation, and within a multicellular organismal context, does not affect the non-mutated cells around it. But there are documented cases where genetic 'mosaicism' occurs due to mutation occuring within the meristematic cells....those cells that divide to help create an elongating shoot/root or expanding leaf. If the progeny cells from this one mutant cell divide onward to eventually create the flower tissue....female and male parts, both of which will harbor the mutation.....then a situation can arise where the fruit derived from this flower is actually different from the fruits elsewhere on the same plant, even if it were exclusively self-pollinating. You can see, therefore, how in rare occasions the excision of a shoot for rooting and transplanting might not guarantee clonality with the donor plant. As small as such changes are, you can imagine ancient gatherers across time along with myriad gardeners of today all making these selection judgements in their respective time periods and regions around the world and it becomes less surprising as how we ended up with the variation and abundance that exists today.
