Sunfired Flare Tomato
How are great open-pollinated vegetable varieties created? Through years of careful tending, a certain amount of cross-pollination, and careful selection for the plants that thrive.
Our friends at Wild Mountain Seeds in Carbondale, Colorado, bred the Sunfired Flare tomato. They often work with a plant breeding method known as “grex gardening”. Last month, we shared a little about carefully-controlled F1 hybrid breeding. Grex gardening is the other end of the spectrum from industrial F1 hybrids. “Grex” is Latin for “flock”, and refers to a population of plants that will be grown closely together and allowed to cross-pollinate naturally over several generations. What you get is a big, diverse population of plants that have crossed and re-crossed many times. Many people call a stabilized grex a “landrace.”
Historically, most plants were landraces: diverse in nature, but also stable. When you plant the seeds of a stable landrace, you know that your plants won’t be completely uniform, but they’ll fall within a predictable range. There’s resilience in that diversity. Gardeners like Joseph Lofthouse have popularized landraces in recent years as a fast track to creating new agricultural biodiversity. It’s a process that everybody can get involved with—all you need to do is save your seeds and grow them again next year! With this method, you don’t need to fear cross-pollination and obsess about purity. Diversity is the goal! Most tomatoes that Wild Mountain Seeds grows come from grexes and landraces they have created.
This Sunfired Flare tomato is a favorite at our farmers’ market stand in Paonia; many customers come just to buy a single tomato every week. It’s one of the best-tasting tomatoes we have ever grown, it’s adapted to our high desert climate, and it’s beautiful!
For more about landrace gardening and grex breeding, we recommend:
- Landrace Gardening by Joseph Lofthouse
- Breeding Organic Vegetables: A Step-By-Step Guide for Growers by Bryan A. Connolly and Rowen White