'Cosmic Purple Rain' Cherry Tomato

Solanum lycopersicum Origin: Carbondale, Colorado Improvement status: Cultivar Seeds per packet: ~20 Germination tested 10/2024: 95% Life cycle: Annual The newest striped anthocyanin cherry 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 healthy antioxidant) in their inedible leaves and stems. Myers and his predecessors, including breeders in the US and Bulgaria in the 1960s, worked with tiny 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 intervening years have seen an explosion in diverse new antho