A feast for the palate but also for the eyes, the lovely Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato is an AAS winner variety that offers an excellent combination of purple and red tomatoes and all that in a lovely small cherry format!
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Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato Profile
Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a small-fruited, support-needed tomato vine growing 60 – 72″ tall and 36 – 48″ wide. As an indeterminate variety, it constantly grows and sets fruits throughout the season, giving a steady supply of fresh fruits until late fall.
The plant booms a little earlier than other indigo varieties, and unique round fruits with characteristic dark overlay, up to 1.5 inches in diameter, appear in bunches 65 to 70 days after sowing.
Since the indigo color appears on the fruit side exposed to direct sun, each fruit has a unique pattern. The outer fruits have larger dark areas. In contrast, the inner ones can only have dotted dark purple or black traces.
The color comes from a pigment called anthocyanin. It contains powerful antioxidants that benefit our health and can be found in blueberry fruits with a much higher concentration.
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Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato Taste
This delicious dwarf offers the best of both worlds: red and indigo! It has a balanced taste with sweet-savory notes but often without the accentuated acidic element in purple tomatoes.
In the cross-section, it retained the sweet and juicy flesh of the red tomato, with a discreet dose of smoky flavor common with indigo tomatoes. Because of this irresistible combination, you can eat the fruits immediately after picking them, without even having to salt them!
How to Care for Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato
Growing Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato is easy if you provide optimal conditions such as many suns, fertile soil, and even moisture.
When to start the Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato?
You can start the seeds indoors 6 weeks before the last expected frost. The germination takes 7 to 14 days at a soil temperature of 75-80ºF.
If you planted the seeds in one container, after the seedlings develop the first pair of leaves, plant them in separate containers so that they develop stronger roots and do not interfere with each other.
You can transplant the seedlings to a permanent place after they develop the third pair of leaves when the danger of late frosts passes.
Tomatoes are generally sensitive to low temperatures, especially in the early stages of growth, so wait for the soil temperature to settle to 605 or 70 F.
You can also sow the seeds outside in late April or the first half of May, but direct seeding in the garden is only acceptable in areas with very long summers.
Water
Depending on the outside temperature, tomatoes should be watered every two to 5 days. This plant does not like dry soil, so on the hottest days, it is necessary to hydrate the plant daily if there is no natural precipitation.
When you water the plant, pour water around the root base – like other types of tomatoes, this one is also prone to leaf disease due to excessive foliage wetting.
Soil
Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato requires well-cultivated, nutrient-rich, well-drained soil that evenly absorbs moisture.
Before planting the seedlings, dig in the soil well to a depth of 2 feet, loosen it, and enrich it with compost or manure.
The pH reaction of the soil should range from 6.0 to 6.8 because tomatoes do not like too acidic or too alkaline soils.
You can reduce the ph value using lime, and sulfur can increase it if necessary.
Fertilizer
If you enrich the soil well with compost or manure before planting, additional feeding is unnecessary since this tomato is sensitive to overfertilization.
However, you can apply granulated slow-release NPK fertilizers with a higher phosphorus and potassium content in the average garden soil that is not fertilized.
The ideal NPK ratio is 3:4:6 or 4:7:10 since it promotes the development of fruits.
You should avoid fertilizers with a high nitrogen content because it stimulates excessive leaf production!
Light
Tomato is a sun lover, so it needs at least 4 to 6 hours of direct sun daily for a good harvest.
They will bear fruit even in a partially shaded position, but such fruits ripen much more slowly and taste less intensely!
There is no such thing as too much sun for a tomato as long as its soil is sufficiently hydrated. Therefore, plant tomatoes in very sunny areas for maximum yield and taste!
When is Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato Ripe for Picking?
As soon as the fruits are formed, while they are still green, dark colors appear on the sunny side.
This species is ready for harvest when the fruit turns an intense red color on the parts that are not darkly colored.
You can use a little trick to determine if a tomato is ripe: pull the calyx, and if the fruit is red in the places the calyx shadows, it is ready for picking!
Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato In Pot
If you don’t have a garden, you can still enjoy your own fresh tomato fruit since it can easily grow in a container on a sunny terrace!
For this type of cultivation, you need a large container of at least 5 gallons in volume, which you fill up to 1 inch or 1.5 inches below the rim so that the water does not spill over when watering.
You can use a standard potting mix combined with one-quarter sand and one-quarter compost. Place support next to the seedling to which you will tie the central stem when the vine grows.
Don’t forget the fruits of this species may be small, but the plant is not miniature and grows three or four feet tall!
The plant in the container needs regular watering (one or two inches of water per week). You can include additional feeding with liquid fertilizer for vegetables when the plant begins to bloom.
With a little care, you can harvest the fruits in the middle of summer so that by autumn, you will have a uniquely colorful and edible decoration!
Midnight Snack Cherry Tomato Usage
This type of tomato was created to be eaten fresh! That’s why it’s best to use it in different salads, where its taste and unusual color will best come to the fore.
Of course, if you have more fruits than your daily consumption, you can make juice, bake them into a tart or roast them into a sauce!
- Have you grown an indigo tomato yet? For many of us, Midnight Snack Hybrid introduces a whole new look for tomatoes—rich, glossy violet to black coloring. But even more important, indigo tomatoes are Pack of Seedsed with much higher levels of antioxidants, making them the absolute healthiest and most disease fighting varieties you can grow. Talk about a win-win!
- AAS Winner 2017. This tomato turns black because it is high in anthocyanin pigments, the same pigment that turns blueberries (another antioxidant powerhouse) blue. Just 1½ inches in diameter and weighing half an ounce, these snack-size cherry tomatoes are nutritional powerhouses. What luck that they also taste so good, Pack of Seedsed with meaty, juicy tomato tang.
- And you will get plenty of opportunity to sample Midnight Snack, because the yields are huge on tall, wide, sprawling indeterminate plants that keep bearing heavily all summer long. Expect far more than 100 fruits per plant—Midnight Snack is more like a binge.
- Start seeds indoors 5 to 6 weeks before the last frost date. Plant outdoors when danger of frost is past and night temperatures consistently remain above 55 degrees Fahrenheit. If an unexpected late frost is forecasted, protect young plants with plastic sheeting or other cover. Set plants 3 to 4 feet apart.
- Wait for the fruits to begin turning purple and black to harvest—that’s when the nutrition is at its peak. Days to Maturity: 68 from transplant.
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