A Tomato for Missoula: Open-Source Citizen Science Tomato Breeding

PROGRAM DESCRIPTION
Rocky Mountain Gardens is doing a tomato trial. Trials are the first step in plant breeding. For the better part of the last hundred years regional universities have had tomato breeding programs but these ended in the early 1990s. Climate change and evolving tomato pests and pathogens may mean that tomato varieties once adapted here may not always be so. The whole concept of what a tomato is has gotten amazingly fancy in recent years- and we can’t let Montana be left behind! Citizen science tomato breeding is the answer to how Montanans can get their hands on amazing new regionally adapted varieties- and keep them coming!

In this workshop you will have a brief background session to explain what William has been doing with tomato breeding and why. You will talk about how to make tomato crosses. Then you will go out to the tomato trials and make as many crosses as you possibly can make together! Everyone will get to try to dissect a tomato flower, remove the anthers, and then extract pollen from another flower to make a new tomato!