This thread is for the early Galapagos Island cherry tomato that I have. I got the seeds from wintersown.org in the fall of 2014 (the site said they were Solanum cheesmanii, which is correctly rendered Solanum cheesmaniae, since it should be feminine). It's my earliest tomato (including among many cherries), and the most prolific cherry I've grown. It's a yellow/gold roundish (kind of ovate) cherry.

Anyway, this year, it's been producing about as expected. I planted a few plants. One of the plants, however, looked like it got a disease or something; I was surprised, since I had never seen it diseased before. I figured it would probably die, by the look of the leaves. All the leaves did die (and most of the fruits ripened) and then (Edit: Nevermind the following remarkable observation in this post! It was a mistake. See post #4 in this thread.) the plant started growing new, healthy leaves to replace the old ones! Anyway, it's still going strong, and is loaded with ripe fruit that I should harvest (and it's very easy to see it thanks to the defoliation). The branches all look fine—not diseased.

I've never seen a tomato defoliate itself and grow new leaves like that, as if it did it on purpose. I've seen a grapefruit tree do it, though! I've seen almost dead plants grow new leaves, but that was different than this. This plant does not appear to have been almost dead. It looks perfectly healthy, as if it shed its leaves on purpose to get rid of the disease or whatever it was. The fruits seem to be fine, too.

Your Galapagos tomato (yellow/gold) must be something other than Sara's Galapagos (red).

Some trees, around here, can defoliate twice in a season. A third time will likely kill 'em, though I've never seen it.

[mention]Tormato[/mention]
Yep. It's definitely different from Sara's Galapagos. I think the variety might properly be called Early Galapagos, since the description sounds pretty much the same as what I get, but it didn't come under that name at wintersown.org; so, I can't say for sure. I don't see any pertinent results when I do a web search for Early Galapagos anymore, though, but I'm pretty sure I saw them a couple years ago.

Actually, I looked at it again, today, and while it is still alive, the new growth doesn't look disease-free. It might be a deficiency making it chlorotic, though, but it's hard to tell. I think I was looking at growth from other tomatoes intermingled with it. The fruit still looks fine, though! The other plants like it in other locations seem to be fine to more than fine.

Sorry about that. I'll edit my opening post so it doesn't deceive people.

Well if I recall correctly, I remember that the Galapagos tomato that Carolyn mentioned, definitely was yellow/golden.. But I may be mistaken... would not be the first time I remember things wrong lol.

Sara's Galapagos is a breed of Solanum lycopersicum, I believe.

Galapagos Island isn't a breed name, but it's the common name for two species of tomato: Solanum cheesmaniae and Solanum Galapagense. They say that tortoises did the selective breeding of Solanum cheesmaniae over many years (and probably the other species, too).

Early Galapagos, I believe, is a breed of Solanum cheesmaniae, which may or may not have hybridized with domestic tomatoes at some point. Early Galapagos is yellow/gold. Most tomatoes that claim to be S. cheesmaniae are yellow/gold, but some appear red or reddish.

Mine is supposed to be Solanum cheesmaniae (but I wouldn't doubt if it had hybridized with a domestic tomato at some point, since the calyxes and leaves don't look quite so curly, nor as fuzzy, as the pictures of Solanum cheesmaniae that I've seen).

I grew Sara's Galapagos once and found it very productive and disease-resistant. I seem to remember that it was infected with Septoria just like all the other varieties, but it grew new leaves and rebounded.

Linda