'Cosmic Mountain Sunset' Cherry Tomato

Solanum lycopersicum Origin: Carbondale, Colorado Improvement status: Cultivar Seeds per packet: ~20 Germination tested 08/2024: 87% Life cycle: Annual A gorgeous anthocyanin-striped cherry tomato from the breeding program of Casey Piscura and Wild Mountain Seeds in Carbondale, Colorado. Like all of the anthocyanin (blue-purple pigmented) tomatoes, this one has its original roots in the breeding program of the great Jim Myers at Oregon State University. Prior to the release of their 'Indigo Rose' in 2012, gardeners could only grow tomatoes that expressed anthocyanin (a useful antioxidant) in their inedible leaves and stems. Myers and his predecessors, including breeders in the US and Bulgaria in 1960s, worked with wild tomatoes from Chile and the Galapagos Islands which expressed anthocyanin in their fruit. They used traditional plant breeding (not any kind of genetic engineering) to cross the closely-related species. The past decade has seen an explosion in diverse new anthocyanin-exp