Born Again: Rebirth of the Jersey Tomato
Everyone pays lip service to the juicy Jersey tomato. Now three Rutgers scientists are close to recreating the greatest Jersey tomato of them all.
On a sunny afternoon in May, the contenders, each plant about 4 inches tall, were growing in a greenhouse in a rural stretch of Cumberland County. A hanging thermometer said the temperature indoors had reached 85 degrees.
“This is about as warm as you want it to get,” said Tom Orton, the plant breeder here at the Rutgers Agricultural Research and Extension Center farm in Upper Deerfield, looking protectively over his seedlings. Orton has a PhD. in plant genetics and tends to talk like a scientist, but he can speak tenderly, almost anthropomorphically, about tomatoes.
As in: “Above the high 80s, tomatoes don’t like it. Around 90, they just sit there and wait for it to get cooler. But if you keep water on them, they get over it.”
As in: “Tomatoes don’t take the weekend off,” so each Saturday and Sunday Orton drives 30 miles round trip from his home in Salem County to water them.
It’s not yet clear which of these 250 little plants in their plastic trays, now starting to branch into the familiar serrated leaves, will triumph in this genetic competition to recreate the Rutgers tomato, touted as the greatest Jersey tomato of all. Orton and his two compadres on this quest have been diligently hybridizing and selecting for four years. These are F-6’s, the sixth generation selected from the two parents Orton began cross-pollinating in 2011.
“These will go out in the field in about two weeks,” Orton said. He noticed a double (two seedlings growing in one plastic cell) and gently dug one out, replanting it in an empty slot. The plan was to truck the seedlings to Rutgers’ Snyder Farm in Hunterdon County, where they’d grow to maturity.
https://njmonthly.com/articles/lifestyle/people/born-again-rebirth-jersey-tomato.html?ct=t(Side_Dish_Issue_1974_11_2013)
Good luck!