Sungold Cherry Tomato Insta-Garden

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

Warm from the sun, skin bursting between your teeth, juice that tastes like tropical candy with a citrus finish. Winner of the Royal Horticultural Society's Award of Garden Merit, and the cherry tomato your kids will steal off the vine before you can pick them.

Indeterminate F1 Hybrid · Seeded February 17 · Flowering now, first ripe fruit in 2–4 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

Sungold was bred by Tokita Seed Company in Japan, a breeding program that traces back to 1975, when company president Tsutomu Tokita tasted his first cherry tomato at the Los Angeles City Market. He spent nine years working to create a sweet cherry adapted to Japanese growing conditions. The result was released in 1992 and introduced to American and British gardeners the same year. It went on to dominate tomato taste tests through the 1990s and 2000s, often by wide margins. Parentage is still a trade secret.

🍴 What you're getting

Bright apricot-orange cherries, half an ounce each, in clusters of 8 to 12 on a stem. Sweet, fruity, tropical, with enough acidity to stay interesting. Some plants are already setting tiny green fruit — ripe cherries coming in weeks, then in waves until first frost.

📅 What to expect

Heavy production starts in May and runs through October. Expect a brief slowdown when Tulsa breaks 95°F — flowers drop, set stalls, and then production resumes when the heat moderates. This plant will outgrow the 2.5 ft stake by July; plan for a taller stake or cage.

💧 Care in Tulsa

Water 2–3 times a week, deeply, at the base. Mulch 2–3 inches thick. One scoop of feed per week. Prune suckers below the first flower cluster for airflow. Pick fully ripe — Sungolds get sweeter the longer they hang, but split when overripe.

☀️ Heat mitigation

Afternoon shade cloth (30%) once sustained temps break 95°F. Morning watering. Mulch is non-negotiable in a 3-gallon pot through a Tulsa summer.

🛡️ Common problems

Hornworms — hand-pick. Aphids — neem oil plus a drop of dish soap in a spray bottle. Spider mites during dry stretches — check leaf undersides. Note: Sungold has no resistance to late blight; if it shows up, remove affected foliage and improve airflow fast.