Indigo Cherry Drop Tomato Insta-Garden

Name: Indigo Cherry Drop Tomato Insta-Garden
Brand: Alchemy Gardens
Price: 30.00 USD
Availability: OutOfStock

Purple-black shoulders, ruby flesh, candy-sweet with a whisper of tart. Same antioxidants as a handful of blueberries in every bite. Bred at Oregon State University and impossible to stop eating once you start.

Indeterminate Open-Pollinated (Plant Variety Protected) · Seeded February 17 · Flowering now, first ripe fruit in 3–5 weeks · Full sun

📦 What's Included

This isn't a tomato start. It's an Alchemy Garden — seeded in February, fed on the farm, flowering and fruiting now, delivered ready to harvest from. You skip the hardest eight weeks of tomato growing and go straight to the table.

Every Insta-Garden comes with:

Established 2-ft tomato plant in a 3-gallon soft pot, seeded February 17 and grown out on-farm
2.5 ft support stake installed (indeterminate varieties will outgrow this — plan to upsize by July)
0.5 lb of Alchemy Gardens weekly feed — the same Mittleider-based formula I use on all 246 tomato plants across my farm, tomato/pepper optimized
Pre-measured weekly scoop — no guessing, no math
One-page growing and feeding instructions — written for Tulsa conditions

You water. You feed once a week. You harvest.

📖 The story

Bred by Dr. Jim Myers, vegetable breeder at Oregon State University, who in 2011 released Indigo Rose — the first purple tomato containing the anthocyanin antioxidants found in blueberries, after a ten-year project. Indigo Cherry Drops followed, with better flavor and yield than Indigo Rose. The purple color has a remarkable origin: wild tomato stock collected in the 1960s from Chile and the Galapagos Islands, housed at UC Davis, rediscovered by Myers's graduate student Carl Jones in the early 2000s while researching how tomatoes affect human health. Every cherry on this vine carries Galapagos DNA, bred using traditional breeding techniques — not genetic engineering.

🍴 What you're getting

1–2 oz fruits with striking dark blue anthocyanin coloration and red flesh, in larger clusters than Indigo Rose. Purple-black shoulders with rosy-red undersides. Sweet with pleasant tartness.

🎯 How to know when they're ripe

This is the one variety where people get it wrong. The purple-black shoulders develop early and stay. Don't pick until the underside blushes red. That's ripe. Picking before the red blush = picking early = flavor you won't like.

📅 What to expect

Steady through summer to frost. The signature purple develops fastest in direct, unobstructed sunlight — don't tuck this one behind a taller plant.

💧 Care in Tulsa

Water 2x per week at the base. Mulch heavily. One scoop of feed per week.

☀️ Heat mitigation

Holds heat reasonably well. Morning water, afternoon shade cloth for 100°F+ stretches. Mulch 2–3 inches thick.

🛡️ Common problems

OSU selected this line for resistance to decay and verticillium wilt, and longer field life than normal tomatoes. Watch for early blight, aphids, hornworms.