Odd-one-out tomato?

[mendacious dog]

So here is a question for all you expert tomato growers. At the moment I’m growing some San Marzano’s and have culled my initial seedlings down to 6 plants in total. All the survivors are more or less the same size at 18” tall, and are currently living in big pots with plenty of leaves etc. Seem very healthy, and all have the first truss of flowers. So far so good.

Five of the six have very typical tomato trusses for this breed, with a central ‘stalk’ having 6-10 tomato flowers zig-zagging along on alternate sides. All very normal. However, the other plant is an anomaly – the central stalk of the truss has bifurcated near the main tomato stem into two separate trusses, each of which has about 10 flowers in the usual zig-zag pattern. Essentially, two trusses for the price of one!

Now, I thought this was just a random mutation until my OH reminded me that when they were seedlings, one of them was a tricot – had thee seed leaves. Guess which one? Yep, the one with the odd double truss. Weird. Anyway, I’ve just examined the second truss on this particular plant (which is just forming really) and it seems like it is doing the same thing – it has split into two trusses before actually shooting out any flower buds.

Soooooo, my questions are many: firstly, how common is this? Is this plant likely to double up all its trusses? Should I let it work twice as hard and risk poorer quality fruit, or should I prune off half of each double truss? And if it’s not really that common, should I try to keep some seeds from any fruit that develops (and if I do, will it keep forming double trusses in its next generation)?

I wish I could take you some photos, but my camera is on the blink!

Any comments would be very gratefully received!

Woof

[Flummery]

I'd keep them all going and do some comparisons - quantity, quality etc. THEN it would be interesting to see if the seed from this one produced a bigger proportion of tricots next year (assuming the outcome of the trials is favourable).

[RedThorn]

As Flummery said plus if the quality and quantity are good, then keep the seeds culling the non tricots and see if after a few generations, you can get it to breed true. I would hazard a guess that if the second set of flowers are split/double then the rest would be too.

[womble]

I had this last year with my gardeners delight. As I understand it, it's a mutation that can be caused by low temps that the plant has had previously before.