Tomatoes

Tomatoes are a good example of how breeding vegetable varieties for the garden works. Breeding is actually easy, but it takes a lot of perseverance and above all continuity until you can finally bring a variety onto the market after six to ten years. In the following, I will briefly explain what is involved in our outdoor tomato breeding programme and how we specifically bred the Happy Black® variety.

How can you, I thought. But Markus " Merciless" Kobelt didn't let up: Yes, exactly, to invest 1-2 days with a photo shoot in the hottest August of all times (?) on the current breeding fields in Buchs, that was his latest job to me. Now I do like to take photos. But I prefer slightly overcast skies - of course just so that the photos turn out as good as possible, certainly not because of me... But what did I notice during the photo safari, armed with the camera and with the eyes of...

For some years now, when breeding new tomato varieties, we have concentrated on outdoor tomatoes that are largely resistant to blight and Alternaria. In discussions, we have heard time and again that the resistance argument is not important regarding tomatoes, that customers would focus on taste, on compact growth types or on diversity (colours, shapes, stripes). Sometimes even the suspicion was expressed that the building of tomato roofs, tomato houses and the like was just part of growing...

In recent years, the Lubera® breeding programmes have also been steadily expanded in the direction of vegetables. The first breeding programme is now bearing fruit, literally. We are pleased to present our Open Sky® outdoor tomatoes. Our Open Sky® tomatoes are designed to simplify cultivation in the home garden. By strictly selecting the healthiest plants, we have developed varieties that can be grown in the garden without further weather protection in Central Europe and they are also...

Tomatoes and aubergine young plants from Lubera Edibles®. We can already see the incredulous amazement in the eyes of many of our customers. And that's why we start early enough to explain what we do at Lubera Edibles vegetable-wise. Because one thing is certain: plant producers as well as young plant producers will have to position themselves more broadly and pragmatically in the future in order to resist the distortions of the market.

When you travel, everything that's different often stands out. The traveller's gaze is – so to speak, the other way round. And it is shaped by what he/she has known for a long time. The traveller sees the difference and learns from it. In this respect, travel is really educating. In this short travel report I try to record some impressions concerning plants and the plant market that I noticed during a two-week trip I took to the United States in July. I have no claim to...

As the new company name, Lubera Edibles®, already suggests, we are expanding our range of young plants from classic soft fruits, such as raspberries, blackberries or blueberries, to anything that can be consumed in any way. This includes edible fruits like kiwis, apples and pears. Or edible roots such as horseradish, Jerusalem artichoke or potato. But also edible leaves, petioles, flowers such as sea kale, tea or rhubarb. We would like to introduce our most important groups of crops in the...

As the new name 'Lubera Edibles' already suggests, we look beyond the borders of fruit and berry plants and also aim at other innovative ranges in the field of edible plants. The focus is on vegetable young plants in particular. With the vegetable young plants, we started by propagating rhubarb, so it is not surprising that our range is the broadest in this category. But it should not stay that way. In this article I report about the current assortment and give hints where Lubera Edibles is...