Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 67.djvu/161

Rh improved fruit varieties of the tomato is only a few years under favorable conditions; and constant care is necessary to maintain their fine quality. Therefore the tendency to deteriorate is doubtless inherent; but this result is evidently hastened by careless cultivation, repeated planting of the same ground without rotation with other crops, the growing of plants from unharvested seed, cross pollination with inferior kinds, differences in character and fertility of the soil, and the influence of a climate much warmer than, or otherwise different from, the one in which the seed was produced. That this fruit degeneration is sometimes slow and sometimes sudden; that it is imminent and variously excited to action; that it is not confined to sporadic cases of single plants, but may, and often does, equally affect a whole crop, and sometimes all the crops of a wide region, is shown by the following statements of relevant facts.

Every person who habitually visits the vegetable markets of any one of most of our towns and cities which are supplied from neighboring gardens is familiar with the different grades in quality of the tomatoes there on sale. Indeed, it is often easy to recognize among them different stages of reversion from some of the more common improved varieties, notably the Acme. These are too plainly cases of gradual degeneration, resulting from careless cultivation and crossing with inferior kinds, to need explanation. Several of my correspondents have furnished me with important corroborative facts. Dr. Geo. G. Groff writes that he has for many years observed in central Pennsylvania, that tomato plants which sprang from seed of good varieties left in the ground during the winter always produced inferior fruit, usually the small kind called cherry tomatoes. Miss Mary E. Starr informs me that during her residence in Saint Martin's Parish, southern Louisiana, her father found it necessary to procure tomato seed from the north for every crop grown on his plantation, because the seed from even the first crop of tomatoes grown there usually produced very small and inferior fruit. Mr. L. S. Frierson, however, writing from northwestern Louisiana, says that he has produced excellent fruit, true to seed, from his home-grown crops. Mr. H. J. Browne, of Washington, D. C, sent me from a plantation near Havana, Cuba, a small parcel of cherry tomatoes taken from plants which he found growing there luxuriantly. The planter assured him that they were the immediate progeny of the first Cuban crop of a fine large fruited variety, the seed of which he obtained from New York under the well-known varietal name of Trophy. He also asserted that such degeneration was always the result of his attempts to raise tomatoes from Cuban-grown seed, however fine might be the variety from which his original seed was obtained. The fruit of the first Cuban crop, like that of southern Louisiana, was always true to northern seed,