Journal December 22, 2014 - Tiny Tomatoes

I want to try a homemade soil mix that I developed for my olive plants on tomatoes, but I do not want to grow a full size plant. In my cold seed storage I found seeds for Florida Petite tomatoes that were there for several years. It is said that these can be grown in a four inch pot, so they seem ideal for what I want to try. Out of the four seeds I tried, only one germinated.

At one time this was supposed to be the smallest tomatoe variety in the world, however, seeds for this variety are now really hard to find.

Florida Petite, the culmination of 10 years of breeding by three Florida geneticists, was the first truly dwarf tomato to appear. Its parent species were two extremely determinate(bush-type) plants, one with yellow, pear-shaped fruit and the other with cherrylike fruit.

The little plant grows four to eight inches tall and spreads almost as wide. Its foliage is dark green and the fruit is the size of cherries. The first taste can be expected about two months after seed is planted. Over the course of the ripening period the yield will be about 25 tomatoes a plant.

I don't think this is a hybrid, so I will probably save some seeds for future use.

The seedling in the photo is a Canino olive, which was only started a few weeks ago.  It was started in sheet of moist paper towel and began to germinate in less than a week.  That is amazing for an olive seed, as they can take months to germinate, if at all.

Having noticed that olive seeds sometimes have a difficult time getting out of the seed coat, I removed the seed from the coat placing it in a horticube.  At first I thought I had killed it, as it did absolutely nothing for several days.  Now, however, I can see that it is beginning to grow.

The horticube is moistened with the same nutrients that I have been using for all of my other seeds under a 24 watt T5 6500K fluorescent light for fourteen hours a day.  As this point I think I am going to place a few more recalcitrant seeds in horticubes and see if it speeds their development.

This is what I found regarding Canino olives:

"CANINO

Also known as: CANINA, CANINESE, MONTIGNOSO
Area of origin: LATIUM

TREE: Very wide spread in the regions of Latium and Umbria, a tree of great size and of a tall upright shape with a compact crown. The leaves are medium-large size, narrow and gray green in color.

FRUIT: A typical oil variety. It has small fruit (1-2 grams), spherical in shape. At harvest, the olives are never all black because the maturation is late (December) but spread out. The yield in oil is moderate (15-16%) but the quality of the product is good.

AGRONOMY: Self sterile with a low ovarian abortion rate (15-20%). This variety is endowed with good productivity even in different climatic environments. Pollinators: Olivone, Frantoio, Pendolino, Leccino. Especially resistant to olive knot, the cold, to the olive fly and to the wind."