Even if you get a stable strain, the blue (anthocyanin) pigment in the fruit only shows up where the fruit is exposed to sunlight. That's why the tops of the fruits tend to be blue. Fruits in the interior of the plant or otherwise shaded will have little or no blue pigment. So (to an extent) you can increase the blue color by pruning off any branches that shade the fruit. No, I am not trying to restart the endless "should you prune tomatoes or not?" debate - just pointing out the role of sunlight in pigment formation.

Hi All, I just wanted to make an interesting observation about the Indigo Rose that I planted from seed I collected the first time I grew it in 2012. I planted a flat of tomato seeds in the late spring of last year with the intention of planting a garden but due to a myriad of distractions I failed to do so... I kept watering the flat on occasion but was mostly neglectful and every so often would pull out the dead and dying until one day in august (I think, maybe september) I decided to plant the survivors who were quite stunted but alive none the less! To my surprise they immediately jumped into action and began to grow rapidly, so since I live in temperate Southern California I decided to let them go and see what happened, in short order they started to set fruit but not ripen very quickly which is a known factor so in keeping with my 2014 gardening 'style' I ignored them some more except for watering and they continued to grow and set fruit throughout the the fall and winter and I have been able to pick some ripe fruit through December and January so far... I was pruning them back yesterday and noticed that some plants were still putting off new branches and flowers so it makes me wonder if I kept better care of future plantings whether or not they might become something of a perennial tomato... Interesting huh?

Sey, "I did not get the eggplant connection" Anthocyanins and other flavonoid chemicals are concentrated in the peel of the eggplant (and the stem of tomatoes) giving eggplant in the common varieties the purple color. Native Mesoamericans may have bred anthocyanins out to domesticate the edible garden tomato, or it may never have been there; Indigo Rose may get some of its color from expression of stem skin on the fruit by some clever directed breeding that originally produced purple in the stem, either way, from anthocyanins. If you eat eggplant skins or tomato or eggplant stems you will get far more of the nutritional value which was the motivation of Indigo Rose in the first place. What is left for me is just the ornamental value of the plant and taste. The concentration of this class of chemicals is in the vicinity of 1300 ppm in eggplant peel and nearly the same in stem. Anthocyanins and related chemicals were most successfully introduced into tomatoes as a GMO in a joint Euro-British project in 2008. What is left is flavor... Anthocyanins and their related sugary bound forms are found in blueberries in a fairly specific profile, about 20x more concentrated vs. Indigo Rose. The indigo-blue tomato developed by the joint British/Italian group has about 100x the anthocyanin content by weight percent vs. OSU's Indigo Rose indigo-blue tomato! Anthocyanin containing wild Solanum berries (sometimes called wild tomatoes in the sense a chimp is a wild man LOL, as researchers argue evolutionary and reproductive similarities and differences) were first characterized as far as I knew around 1962 by Charley Rick, the Univ. of California Davis, humble guy who rode his bike shirtless around campus and was the original world tomato expert, and who was undoubtedly a resource in the early days of conception of Indigo Rose. A bright graduate student was responsible for beginning the project that led to Indigo Rose with his faculty adviser, and the student brought some seeds from Seeds of Change, a high carotenoid line, where he had worked when it was recently taken over by the Mars Candy Company. This complemented wild and hybridized lines from the Charles Rick Center at UCD, and the garden tomato variety chosen to carry the alien genetics (wild stuff) was the English heirloom Ailsa Craig. A generation of students later the project was finished, four years after the Euro-British team had theirs by express GE technology using two single snapdragon flower genes to get the far superior anthocyanin yield and alleged superior taste to conventional varieties, which is or was being commercialized in Canada to make purple tomato juice and pizza sauce last I heard. Micro-Tom, a 1989 dwarf red variety from Univ. Florida ( :-) ! ) was apparently used as their original variety to receive the snapdragon flower's two genes, though it appears to me that it might now be crossed. I don't know the current status since the entrepreneurial head of the Canadian operation, from Leamington, the tomato capital of Ontario, was murdered recently under unexplained circumstances in Brazil, where he might have been scouting down a lead for an improved grass that can produce high yields of ethanol that outdo corn. I went through this to simply explain my understanding of the two different tomato programs since then I think you can better understand my opinions on taste and why I'd actually prefer the European GMO blue tomato. The OSU variety so far contains large sections and genes from Solanum lycopersicoides, a wild Solanum that has no available information to show it is safe in our diets. Similarly, I'm not aware another of its parents, S. chilense, is even edible either. It is the contribution to flavor that all the alien DNA and resulting expression of wild biomolecules these alien or so called 'wild' genes have that I'm sure are responsible for the taste I find awful and don't really want to eat. A critical distinction is that the anthocyanins are not responsible for the off-taste themselves. On the other hand, the European variety only has the two specific alien anthocyanin (purple-expressing) genes from the flowers, a surgically precise trait without any baggage, in a completely otherwise garden tomato. I'm cautious about believing super-flavor claims but also see it is much more achievable. Bottom line for my opinion only, is that until Indigo Rose goes through many generations more of selective breeding for flavor, it is the only tomato I ever met I spit out and make a face :-(. For the minority that post they like it, I'm very pleased to hear it! lgteacher, As for the GE background of Indigo Rose, the brilliant developers of it are quick to point out that it has not been genetically modified, and I'd be ok with that it weren't being promoted as if the biotech techniques developed for making GMOs, which themselves require extensive production of research GMOs to elucidate all the gene functions they pieced together to make the final conventional product. Whether the OSU team did it or relied on others' research seems irrelevant to me. To get the accurate story rather than reading what are marketing (press releases etc.), I'd ask who funded the research besides taxpayers, and maybe the original grad student who worked on Indigo Rose who might now be a lead strategist at Monsanto for integrating worldwide Capsicum (Pepper) traits that Big Ag feels are important, you never know ... and if he talked, he might have a unique perspective on the history of the project! Don't get me wrong, OSU had a brilliant academic project, it is only the marketing...and poor flavor that make it a zap except for a nice ornamental until someone gets one of those deep, solid, vivid indigo British tomato nuggets to share, the only game in town for us so far. Cheers PC

BUMP As I said before ,the one int the picture most probably is NOT Indigo Rose. --IR has round and darker color fruits. -- IR has RL. But the one in the picture looks more like JBT, with PL. I know this; I had a JBT last year and I am growing couple of then this season Anyway, I am growing one IR right now. I bought the plant ( Bonni grown). I am surprised that in addition to being loaded w/. buds & flowers, it has several fruits, the biggest one is small cherry size. I will take picture and report on it. If you are growing IR, come in and share your info. Sey