Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium Seeds | Yellow Currant Tomato
LATIN NAME: Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium
COMMON NAME: Yellow Currant Tomato
Plant Profile
Like the species, this is a sprawling, free-running vine with finely cut leaves and loose, many-flowered trusses. The fruits are one to two centimetres across, golden-yellow, thin-skinned, and produced in such numbers that a single plant can hang hundreds at the peak. It crops across the long warm season and tolerates heat better than many large-fruited tomatoes.
The yellow form is a selected colour variant of the wild currant tomato rather than a separate species; the underlying plant is identical in leaf and habit, only the fruit pigment differs. Growers have kept it because the golden fruits show up beautifully against green foliage and because the milder taste suits fresh eating.
Because the vine trails and the fruit hangs in strings, it is as happy spilling from a hanging basket or window box as it is climbing a trellis. In a basket the long trusses drape over the rim like strands of beads, which is its most decorative use and a good way to keep the fruit clean and off the soil.
The golden colour comes from carotenoid pigments, especially beta-carotene, laid down in the skin and the thin layer of flesh beneath it. Red tomatoes lean on lycopene; yellow and gold types shift the balance toward beta-carotene, which is why the interior looks pale rather than red.
As with the red currant, the small fruit carries a high soluble-solids load, but the yellow form tends to read sweeter because its acid is a little lower. The result is a mild, fruity bead that pops with juice, more dessert than savoury in character.
Science & Biotechnology
Chemically the fruit shares the aromatic volatiles of its wild parent, the esters and alcohols that give currant tomatoes their distinctive scent, only softened by the lower acid. This shared profile is why the yellow and red forms taste like close kin despite the colour difference.
Uses & Benefits
This is a fresh-eating tomato through and through, too small and too sweet for sauce but perfect for the moments when a whole fruit is the right portion.
Because the fruits are bite-sized, sweet, and grow at child height in a basket, they make an ideal first gardening crop for a family. Kids will graze the trusses, which is the easiest way to guarantee the plant gets picked often enough to keep fruiting.
In quantity the fruits can be slow-dried or oven-dried like cherry tomatoes, concentrating the sugar into chewy golden raisins that keep well. Their thin skins mean they dry faster than larger types, though the small size makes them fiddly to prepare in bulk.
Growing from Seed
Start it warm like any tomato, and give the trailing vine room to run or hang. It is unfussy about soil as long as it stays warm and fed through the season.
Sow the fine seed shallowly in warm trays and keep the medium warm; prick the seedlings into pots once two true leaves show. Set the young plants into the garden or basket when they carry three pairs of true leaves and stand about twelve to fifteen centimetres tall, spacing them thirty to forty centimetres apart if grown in the ground, or one plant per hanging basket.
Let the vine trail or tie it to a light trellis; either way keep it off damp soil and pick the trusses often so the plant keeps setting new ones. Water at the base, feed when the first fruit sets, and the yellow currant will crop until cold nights stop it. For a contrasting red try the Red Currant Tomato Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium, and for a larger sweet fruit the Pepino melon seed is a relative worth growing.
Our Take
I keep yellow currant tomato in a basket by the door so the grandchildren can help themselves. Plant it next to the Red Currant Tomato Lycopersicon pimpinellifolium for a two-tone display, and if you want a big pink slicer for the same season the Brandywine Tomato Lycopersicon lycopersicum rounds out the row.
Related Reading
More species in the same orbit as Yellow Currant Tomato: