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Sprite tomato

Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2020 4:49 am
by Shule
What are your experiences with Sprite?

It sounds like a determinate, smaller version of Juliet F1. It looks like a miniature version of Napoli.

The one thing I'm wondering most about it is how long it produces, or whether it's all-season.

Re: Sprite tomato

Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2020 11:57 am
by SPinNC
I grow it every year here in NC. It has always performed well and seems to keep producing into the early fall for me. Lovely, tasty red grape tomatoes with moderately thick skin that keeps well on the counter.

Re: Sprite tomato

Posted: Thu Apr 30, 2020 12:41 pm
by pepperhead212
I grew it for the first time last season, and it was the first grape tomato that I have liked! Unlike every other grape before, I never got any spitters - usually about 1 in 10 of all the others. Got the seeds in a trade - the lady said she saved the seeds every year. Not a real strong tomato flavor, but balanced, so.ewhat sweet, and it keeps very well, as noted above. It's sort of a determinate, but not the type that dies off after a single harvest - I kept getting a large flush of tomatoes, up until the cold stopped them. The plant was not really disease resistant, but every plant I had last year had fungus problems, as there was near record rainfall up until mid July. But the leaves on those vines would just dry up and fall off, while the new parts were growing, and eventually getting another flush of flowers. Here is a photo of the second harvest from that one plant, before the rain stopped (after about 7-18 we went into a drought!), and there were almost no splits - another plus for this variety.
ImageSprite grape tomatoes, all from one plant, 7-16 by pepperhead212, on Flickr

I wouldn't say that these are heat resistant, but I didn't get a slow down from the bad heat wave in late July, probably because this one had its next next flush of tomatoes developing, and basically no blossoms to drop! I lucked out with the timing, but I don't know how it would do in constant high heat.

Re: Sprite tomato

Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2020 8:35 pm
by pepperhead212
The sprite are my last two tomato plants out there - I'll be out tomorrow, to pull all of the ripe, or starting to ripen ones, as it may frost tomorrow night.

Re: Sprite tomato

Posted: Thu Oct 29, 2020 11:35 pm
by Shule
We had Sprite tomatoes to the end, also (although one of the Galapagos Island volunteers—not the plant from the antifreeze fruit I started early—was the last tomato to survive the frost). Most of our Sprite tomatoes split late in the season, though, but were perfectly blemish-free before that. We're planning to put a Sprite tomato plant in the flower garden next year.

I thought they were pretty good. Very little juice. Mostly meat. Very sweet. Cherry size; paste shape. They fell off the plant pretty easily when harvesting (you have to be careful). Prolific. Lots of flowers. Small plant. Good candidate for a wire tomato cage, if there ever were one! Mine weren't early, though; they were midseason; that may be the soil, though. No BER. The plant eventually had a foliage issue that I didn't recognize, but whatever it was didn't kill it, nor harm the fruit.

I grew the plant with drought, black plastic, and a wire tomato cage (which it does not seem to have destroyed).