How cool is this!!! Brand new to the world of gardeners this year: Seeds of the “Empress” solid purple cherry tomato became approved for sale to the US public! Scientists at Norfolk Healthy Produce were able to use bioengineering technology to insert the dark anthocyanin-pigment trigger gene from snapdragon flowers (which are also edible) and put them into cherry tomatoes. Their goal was a success: resulting in royal purple color through-and-through the tomato, while bringing with it the health promoting properties of plentiful antioxidant compounds. As a result, they regard these tomatoes as a “superfood,” like blueberries. The scientists realized that people typically do not eat enough of the high-antioxidant blueberries, but we sure do eat lots of tomatoes and tomato products! So, this spring we ordered a seed packet and grew 9 beautiful tomato plants through the summer.
We experimented with making purple salsa, otherworldly purple “Outer Space” pizza, space salsa, and purple tomato soup! We were thrilled to learn that the purple pigments do not break down in the heat of cooking, giving us beautiful purple-hued results.
The vendor says that the seeds are allowed to be saved for our future gardening efforts and will breed true to this year’s purple tomato variety. We are stocked up for next year! Along the way, we also grew an assortment of heirloom tomatoes, and marveled at their beautiful colors, flavors, fragrance, and juicy textures compared to store-bought “corporate” tomatoes, which have instead been bred to stay hard and ripen so slowly over the course of nearly a month, while sacrificing many of the wonderful heirloom traits in the breeding that happened during their corporate development. What a difference, the joy of heirloom home-grown tomatoes!
