No. Certainly not.

Save seeds from the plants you love and enjoy growing them and sharing them.

Of course, saving seeds requires a little judging--if you think the plant has been a misery to you because it seemed grossly diseased, and/or had poor quality of crop then you might not want to save seeds from it, but if the plant gave you joy and cropped fine fruit then save its seeds and share them.

No Larry, I haven't said that saving seeds from fruits of just one plant leads to a genetic bottleneck, that's a much larger and different question.

I have said that it's best to save several fruits from one plant for seed, better still to save several fruits from two plants, etc.

And the reason is that if you aren't bagging blossoms, you lessen the possibility of saving X pollinated fruits.

If I save save seeds from just one fruit and half the seeds are X pollinated that's one thing, but if I save seeds from many fruits and the majority of the fruits aren't cross pollinated that's far better.

I've saved seed from lots of fruits, listed them with SSE, offered them in a seed offer and maybe it took a couple of years and dispensing 100's of seeds to lots of folks before an off type appeared.

I used to grow so many plants that bagging blossoms was impossible. And since I fell and am confined to a walker I now grow only about 30 plants here at home, all taken care of by someone else, and with help I do a few fermentations, but someone else now does almost all my seed production for SSE listings and a seed offer and that person bags almost all blossoms for seed production, since I send her seeds for the same varieties I'm growing.

And here at home I have only one plant of each variety. Since blossoms self pollenize most of the time there's no problem saving the seeds you want but if I were you I'd try to save seed from several fruits off that one plant.

At the top of this first page if you click on the FAQ link you'll find an excellent article about how to prevent cross pollination, with pictures.

Hope that helps.

Carolyn

Thank you very much ladies. Happiest of holidays.
Larry

I'll add a bit to the above discussion. A genetic bottleneck is what happens when an entire species gets down to just a few individuals. The result is a severe lack of diversity across the entire species. The best natural example of this is the Cheetah which was squeezed down to just a few individuals within the last few thousand years. The result is a species that is so closely related that skin grafts from one cheetah can be placed on another with no rejection.

The tomato is a different animal entirely. There are about 50 Billion tomato plants grown world wide each year. Diversity is very wide though many of the plants are from highly similar hybrids.

The tomato is a natural inbreeder that self pollinates about 95% of the time. This results in a genome that is able to withstand substantial amounts of inbreeding without problems. Essentially, you could let a tomato self pollinate for hundreds of generations with little of no effect from the inbreeding. It is natural in the species.

It is easily proven that a plant which is crossed can often exhibit vigor and/or disease tolerance that is not present otherwise. This is not true of all crosses. Corn for example is an extreme example of a natural outcrosser that shows high levels of heterosis when an appropriate cross is made. This means that the crossbred offspring is more vigorous than at least one parent and most often than both parents. Tomatoes exhibit heterosis too but it is often mid-parent heterosis where the offspring is more vigorous than one parent but less than the other. The advantage of hybrids with tomatoes are in uniformity of fruit produced, disease tolerance, and vigor of the plants. Unfortunately, most tomato breeding to date has not had flavor as an objective. This, plus commercial production methods, has led to the cardboard tomatoes found in stores today.

As Carolyn said above, the risk with tomatoes is not from a genetic bottleneck, rather it is from an undetected cross that results in seed that do not match the variety in question. By saving seed from multiple plants and multiple fruit, you significantly reduce the chance of getting an undetected cross.

DarJones

domesticated tomatoes, including heirlooms, are the result of genetic bottleneck in that they have limited genetic diversity and variability compared to the wild species found in south america. the bottleneck occurred in two different periods; first when tomatoes were domesticated in meso-america and then further bottlenecked when those were taken to europe.

Bottle necking tomatoes can be a real bothersome issue like in the case of Heinz ketchup is a glass bottle. Solution: plastic squeeze bottles.

groan

hoosiercherokee don't quit your day job.