We have 3 varieties of tomato in a raised bed: esterina (left), Brad's atomic grape (mid), and sungold (right). We planted all three as starts from a local nursery.
The esterina have these little brownish red spots IN the skin. It's not a bump or something – surface is smooth. The B.A.G. have something similar but are lighter in color and more yellow-orange than all the pictures I've seen. Sungold look normal (I think).
Could this be cross-pollination/hybridization? Or is this some disease I should be worried about?
I've read that most tomatoes are usually self-pollinating, but the three plants in our bed definitely have intermingled, so cross-pollination would not surprise me.
by ElegantConundrum
8 Comments
Any cross pollination wouldn’t show up in the tomatoes until you plant seeds from these next year
No. That’s not how it works.
Your local nursery may have had a cross or mixup with the parents of the (not) Brad’s Atomic Grape plant you grew.
No, the fruit of crossed plants doesn’t change from the original type. The seeds from crossed fruit would produce a hybrid.
The middle variety looks like a variety called blush.
It’s probably a mild fungal thing. If the plants seem healthy then it’s nothing to worry about. As others have said, it’s definitely not cross-pollination, and even tomato plants growing through each other are unlikely to cross-pollinate anyways.
You’d have to plant the seeds of the cross pollinated plants and wait for the tomatoes to find out.
So I don’t know what exactly the dots are–most small blemishes like this are not a problem unless it starts really taking over, but that’s definitely something environmental.
About pollination, this is my favourite way to explain it because I think it’s a really accessible way to understand the basics. So cross-pollination is sexual reproduction–the genes of two parents are combined to create the next generation, the same as in humans and other animals. As humans, we tend to focus on the fruit because that’s the part we eat, but the fruit is really an organ belonging to the mother plant, so you can think of it more like a uterus. Whatever variety the mother plant is, that’s what determines what all the fruit on the plant looks like, so any differences are caused by environmental factors, not genetics (except for chimerism or grafting)–I mention this because you’ll see a lot of people showing different-looking squash coming from the same plant and think that they’re different varieties that have been crossed with different parents. The seeds are what contain the genetic material for the next generation and what the plant and fruit of the next generation looks like. That’s why you have to grow out saved seeds in order to see the results of a cross. This goes for most common vegetables, with the exception of anything where the vegetable *is* the seed, so corn is a notorious cross-pollinator, and shelling beans can sometimes cross but usually don’t because of how their flowers are shaped. So, if your fruit look different than you think they should, it could be that the seed source was crossed last year (or whenever) and the plants you bought were not the true variety, but the cross won’t have happened in your garden. It’s also really common for the same variety from different seed sources to be a bit different. If you think about it, even if they started from the exact same seeds, over time the populations adjust and drift off in their own directions, and this happens a lot with tomatoes. Hope that helps!
The middle one looks more like Blush than Brad’s Atomic Grape to me. Maybe the nursery mixed up some plants?