What is the strain to create "celebrity" and "early girl"?.
Are the parents hybrid or OP?.

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For some of the earliest hybrids such as Big Boy, Better Boy, Ramapo and the like there were only two parents and each was OP.

For later hybrids the parentage is never given b'c the tomato seed business is very competetive and such information is proprietary.

For more modern hybrids there can be up to 4 parental gene inputs into each breeding line and there are two breeding lines, so there can be up to 8 parental gene inputs, and each of the selections in each of those breeding lines is OP.

Then comes the fine day when the last OP selection in each line is crossed to create the hybrid plant and the seeds produced from those fruits are the F1 hybrid seeds.

I've linked to the NCSU Cultivar list below and if you scroll down to the tomato listings you'll see what I mean when parentages are not given for the more modern hybrids.

And actually Celebrity and Early Gorl are not even on the list. And that's not at all uncommon since as I said above, such information is not made public.

With some hybrids one can infer that at least if it's a cherry tomato variety with a flat truss that one of the parental inputs was a currant tomato, S. pimpinellifolium, b'c that's what's used to breed in the flat truss trait gene.

Hope that helps.

Carolyn

Here is a link that might be useful: NCSU Cultivar List

I suspect, but cannot be sure, that Celebrity, Carnival and Bush Celebrity share at least one parent. In fact, in the case of Carnival (which I think became unavailable this year) and Bush Celebrity (which was next to impossible to get last year and seems unavailable this year) share one parent because they seemed to have gone out of availability simultaneously. In any case, the parent lines of those varieties surely are closely guarded proprietary material and not available in any open pollinated form to home gardeners.

In the case of Early Girl, which currently in fact is called Early Girl Improved, has as one parent a potato leaf cultivar that is similar to Matina and some other early season, potato leaf types.

The previous Early Girl (not the current "Improved") had the same or similar open pollinated parent line as can be witnessed by an open pollinated version of "Early Girl" still kept (but I think discontinued from sale) by Peters Seed Research called PSR-37, which is not as good as Early Girl Improved with regard to growth habit, vigor, yield, fruit size, consistency, etc. I've got some old PSR-37 seed maybe 2 - 3 years old, but don't intend to fool with it anymore.

The current Early Girl Improved can be grown out to discover the truth about its PL parent line ... I've done it and have 3 separate but very similar PL types from EGI none of which are as good as Early Girl Improved hybrid in any regard whatever. Nothin' to write home about there either.

Back to Celebrity, in a manner of speaking ...

Look at this Web page to see an example of how some breeders develop, maintain and distribute breeding line germplasm. I'm sure whatever the parent lines are for Celebrity were developed from, maintained, distributed, etc. similarly to this: NCSU Fresh Market Hybrid Tomato Breeding Lines

By the way, the "CELBR" designation on those first two tomatoes has absolutely nothing to do with "Celebrity." I just linked that page as an example of what you're asking about in the original post.

Bill

Tournesol,

I'm sorry, I failed to answer one of your questions ...

"Are the parents hybrid or OP?"

The parents of a commercial hybrid tomato cultivar would have to be TWO stable, open pollinated breeding lines because then you'd have TWO parents whose homozygotous genes will combine in heterozygotous pairs ... Aa, Bb, Cc, bam, bam bam ... right down the gene strands.

[Aside here: Regardless of how many "inputs" there are to the end resulting F1 seed that is marketed, there are still only TWO immediate parents to the final product ... one is the pollen donor and the other is the pollen recipient (seed mother) ... not withstanding reciprocal crosses.]

If you were to cross a heterozygotous (F1 hybrid) tomato with a stable, open pollinated tomato, you would NOT get the same identical gene pairing in each extracted seed. You would get substantial variations (depending on the diverse nature of the parents) of genetic masking/expressions in the resulting F1 seed that is NOT a desirable result or intent of creating hybrid tomatoes in the first place ... so it just ain't done when creating commercial hybrid tomatoes.

If the only kinds of tomatoes one planted in their garden were good tasting tomatoes, wouldn't any crosses most likely be good tasting too even if they weren't the same as the parents? Just wondering.

califorian

not always. chances are better though.

one might even see hybrid vigor for flavor (improvement over either of the two original parents).

"Early Girl" seeds are sold by many suppliers. Are all these F1 seeds then bred from the same parents? If so how can such a parentage of such a popular and long standing hybrid be secret?

ALSO it seems to me that you could propagate from the succors without loosing characteristics.

This year I am growing Sweet Cluster from bought seed and from a supermarket fruit and seeing if I can with selection over a few generations get an OP version.

Any comments relevant to this or anyone experience is this would be much appreciated.