For the coming growing season.

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I am interested in cross breeding two tomato varieties. I want to cross breed a branch San Marzano tomato plant with pollen from a Portuguese oxheart tomato plant.

I will look at when to start each variety so that they go in bloom at the same time. What I am interested in is how to cross pollinate tomato flowers so that I don’t get the pollen that I don’t want on a stamen. Since tomato flowers point downward, it seems that preventing an undesired pollination is going to be a difficult task. One person believes that very small eyedroppers that can be used to suck out undesired pollen may work, although painstaking. The desired pollen can then be sprayed on the stamen. All that assumes that bees don’t blow up the entire plan, since they are industrious little beasts by day and I have just so much time to dedicate to the effort.

Any experts that have successfully cross bred tomato plants?

I realize that I won’t see the actual outcome until 2022.

On edit: I have done selection of tomato seeds to improve things like size and color, but I have never tried to cross breed. The reason why I am trying now is that I believe that I can tweak the flavor, San Marzano tomatoes are rich flavored, Portuguese Oxheart tomatoes are mellower flavored. One other option is to select seeds for several seasons until I get the San Marzano variant that I envision and forget about the cross pollination.