Posts Tagged: Sungold
Plant Profiles: Sungold Tomato
Sungolds are an F1 hybrid, meaning it has two different tomato plant varieties for parents where one variety is pollinated by the other variety's pollen. You can buy seeds for Sungold tomatoes but if you save seeds from your Sungold cherry tomatoes and plant them next year, they may not grow up to resemble or taste like a Sungold.
One reason Sungolds are so yummy is that they have high sugar content. One website that sells the seeds and starts says they have “explosively sweet flavor.” They mature in 55 to 65 days and the plant can grow up to 10 ft tall. Because they are indeterminate producers, they will continue to produce tomatoes which ripen throughout the growing period. According to Bonnie Plants they are resistant to Verticillium wilt (V), fusarium (F), and tobacco mosaic virus (TMV). Click here if you'd like to learn more about tomato pests and how to manage them.
Once you have your Sungold cherry tomatoes, make a tomato salad!
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Thars Gold in Them Thar Hills!
That would be ‘Sungold’ tomatoes (Solanum lycopersicum) in the Solano Foothills. (What an appropriate choice for our Under the Solano Sun Master Gardener blog.) Nothing tastes better than tomatoes fresh from your garden; however, some tomatoes are better than others. ‘Sungold’ tomatoes are among the most sweet, prolific, and tolerant tomatoes available.
How sweet are they? They have been compared to liquid sun, sugar candy, and gems of golden flavor. Their big fruity flavor makes them great straight from the vine, in salads, and pasta sauces (see recipe below).
The vines get huge, so allow for lots of room and extra tall tomato cages. They are the first to mature and the last to harvest, and although small, the plants produce so many that it is hard to keep up with them.
Requiring full sun, this little orange indeterminate American hybrid is disease-resistant to Fusarum wilt, Verticillum wilt, root knot nematodes, and tobacco mosaic virus. They are so hearty that volunteers easily pop up in your garden. They flourish in the ground, in raised beds, or in containers. Even with late rains, cold, and frost like we have had the last two seasons, ‘sungolds’ keep on producing when other tomatoes get “touchy”.
‘Sungolds” won Great First to Ripon Race of 2011 and third place out of more than one hundred tomatoes at the Morningsun Herb Farm 2010 Tomato Day. Next time you are looking for a tomato to plant, seriously consider this golden nugget.
Sungold Pasta Sauce
1 cup (or more)‘Sungold’ tomatoes cut in half
sea salt and white pepper to taste
1-2 Tbs fresh minced basil
3-4 ears of white corn with kernels removed
2-3 cloves of minced garlic (varies with your taste)
2-3 Tbs. butter
2-3 Tbs. virgin olive oil
1 cp white wine
1 lb sea scallops seared in butter
1 pound fresh pasta cooked no longer than 3 minutes
Parmesan cheese shavings
Sauté garlic in butter and olive oil. Add ‘sungolds’, corn kernels, salt, pepper, basil, and wine. Cook about two minutes. Pour on top of pasta, sea scallops, and cheese. Enjoy.