Sungold & exploring various "fruity" notes

[Vicki]

Hi all. This is my first post besides introducing myself, and I am new to plant breeding, so I would really appreciate any thoughts or insight into the project I am planning.

I have two goals with this breeding project:

1. To create something similar or good enough to be comparable to the Sungold to be free of buying its seeds in perpetuity. This means approval from my husband with a very good palate. I'm looking for a cherry tomato that is "a similar intense and fruity flavor, with slightly more acid" in comparison to Sungolds.

2. Exploring different notes of fruit in tomatoes and breeding a group of particularly interesting or delicious OP tomatoes with Sungold/ equivalents.

My first step is to trial more varieties in 2026 with fruity notes in order to find a mix of varieties with unusual or especially good and varied notes. So I don't want them all to have an aftertaste of citrus, rather I'd be looking for a mix of notes within the selected group of varieties, such as guava, generic tropical, melon, etc. Intense flavor as well would be nice but not necessary.

I plan to also trial several Sungold-type hybrids to find a couple of the fruitiest/ best flavored of the bunch. The next step would be to cross the selected fruity OP varieties with the hybrids and select down from there to see if I can find any particularly interesting or unique fruity notes.

I may look at back crossing some on-the-market OP Sungold descendants with Sungold itself later on if I can't find what I'm looking for with this first pool. I simply don't have the space for both right now.

These are the varieties I plan to trial for the "Sungold-type hybrid" category. I've only tried Sungold, so I'd like to hear if you've tried any of the below and any differences in taste you note.

Sungold
Sunsugar
Sun Orange
Sweet Gold

Here are some varieties I plan to trial next year for "fruity" notes. These first two I've tried and found delicious, different enough and fruity in their own way, so I will grow them out again.

Goldie
Big Rainbow/ Pineapple

I'm definitely including the below in the trials as they will have a diverse gene pool and interesting potential for flavors:

Tim's Taste of Paradise
Cheri's Cherry

The varieties below I have not tried but have been described as some sort of fruity, but most people don't explain exactly what kind of fruit or more details. If you have any additions or have tried the following, please give me your opinions to their fruitiness and overall taste. I don't have the space to grow all of the below, so I will either have to narrow the list down.

Green Giant
Emerald Golosina
Great White
Sweet Cream
Jaune Flamme
Amy's Apricot
White Rabbit
Tiger Paw
Dikovinka

And if you have any tomatoes at all that come to mind when you hear the word "fruity" that I am missing and need to try, either hybrid or OP, please let me know as well so I can add to my list.

This year, to practice crossing tomatoes I'm going to cross Sungold with several purple varieties I have growing. I'll decide later if growing those out first would be a good first step before leaping into this larger project.

[Tim DH]

Hi Vicki,
     Welcome to the forum.
     My recommendation would be to do a LOT of reading! The Tomato Junction site is a good place to browse. I've just bought up 877 matches to a Sungold search there! Threads with titles like 'Sungold F2 project', 'Better than SunGold' and 'California Sungold' should keep you busy for quite a while!!

     For comparison a Sungold search here produces 52 hits. But threads like 'Sungold F1 - creating F0 parents?' and 'Sungold F1 and Sunsugar F1 breeding with and dehybridization' have some quality info. in them.

Good Luck

Tim DH

[Vicki]

Hi Vicki,
     Welcome to the forum.
     My recommendation would be to do a LOT of reading! The Tomato Junction site is a good place to browse. I've just bought up 877 matches to a Sungold search there! Threads with titles like 'Sungold F2 project', 'Better than SunGold' and 'California Sungold' should keep you busy for quite a while!!

     For comparison a Sungold search here produces 52 hits. But threads like 'Sungold F1 - creating F0 parents?' and 'Sungold F1 and Sunsugar F1 breeding with and dehybridization' have some quality info. in them.

Good Luck

Tim DH

Thank you for the forum and post recommendations! I'll definitely be reading and researching more this year, and it's great to have a place to start.

[Alex]

I tried Sungold Select II tomatoes. I didn't like them, they were tasteless. I don't understand why they are so praised, they probably have never eaten really tasty tomatoes. For example, Kamatis na ligaw tomatoes are really tasty and very sweet.

[Jordy]

Last year i did  a little project to see how the gene flow was of a hybrid sungold x rötte murmel ( Solanum pimpinellifolium) to my suprise the yellow coloroured fruits where better overall then the red fruits.

[Roland]

Many have tried to dehybridize Sungold but have never captured the original flavor in an open-pollinated (OP) variety.
This might be because Sungold's flavor is determined by many genes working together, and these genes are likely heterozygous in Sungold. If just four different genes are involved, you already need 256 plants per generation to have a chance of finding one plant with all the right gene combinations.

It's also quite possible that Sungold's unique flavor requires certain genes to be heterozygous to express properly. If that's the case, you could try crossing existing OP Sungold descendants with each other, hoping to recreate that heterozygous combination.

Keep in mind during your breeding project that Sungold has exerted stigmas, which makes it highly prone to cross-pollination. Be sure to protect the flowers from insect contact to prevent unintended crosses.

[Roland]

If i understand correct these are al Open polinated varieties from Sungold F1:
Ambrosia Gold
Ambrosia Orange UBX
Ambrosia Red
Sungold Select
Sungold Select II
Big Sungold Select
Gobstoppe
Santiam Sunrise?

En deze zouden de smaak kunnen benaderen:
California Sungold
Honeydrop
Maddeline's Vine Candy (Sunsugar)

[Vicki]

Thanks all for tips and different varieties to research!

Roland- I definitely don't have space for 256+ plants! And thanks for the tip about the exerted stigmas.

Oh, one other question: Would there be a big difference in whether Sungold would be the father or the mother when crossing? I'm not knowledgeable about genetics honestly but am still learning.

[William Schlegel]

Oh, one other question: Would there be a big difference in whether Sungold would be the father or the mother when crossing? I'm not knowledgeable about genetics honestly but am still learning.

Usually not but it is a good recommendation to try crosses in both directions if possible.

I would add that I think Sungold F1 is good breeding material even if it's offspring are not quite like it. It has fast maturity and confers good fruity flavors to many offspring.

[KaguyaCloud]

I love the flavor exploration aspect of your project. I wish I had the space to even do that.

My advice is to select purely for flavor over everything else. Flavor has a lot of complex gene interactions that can be dominant, recessive, co-dominant, etc and isn't necessarily linked with any physical traits of the fruit or plant. Don't be surprised if certain flavors are not present in the first crosses, as they could re-appear in later generations.

If you can, I would recommend performing a blindfolded triangle test with your breeding project tomato and a Sun Gold fruit to see if they can be easily discerned.

Try to avoid scope creep. It's usually recommended to grow out a lot of F2 plants per cross to get a general idea on the quality or flavor of the fruits. In my project for example, I only had 1 good tasting compact F2 tomato out of 30+ individuals over several seasons. Keeping the scale small and focused will prevent you from being overwhelmed.

Make sure you can have an indication of a successful cross when you choose your parents, or else you'll be growing F2s of the Sun Gold parent. Fruits of successful crosses tend to be smaller and have very few seeds(around 1-4 per fruit in cherry tomatoes).

Another alternative that you can do instead of buying seed is to continually propagate a cutting or seedling of Sun Gold indoors forever. I've been able to successfully do so with a huge growing tomato Rosella Cherry for the last 2 years. You can essentially bonsai them  by cutting off the tops after about 4 leaves have grown and repeat on the side shoots that grows between each leaf.

[William Schlegel]

I kind of deliberately stopped using Sungold because I already had some sungold genetics in one of my early crosses (Blue Ambrosia x Amurski Tiger) so I was worried about not having enough diversity. Fortunately I've since made crosses with Sunviva, Fruity the ancestor of Tim's Taste of paradise, a fruity line of Lofthouse promiscuous, and Dwarf Eagle Smiley. I've also crossed a lot of bicolors with current tomatoes and so I reckon I now have quite a few small yellow cherry tomatoes.

[Tim DH]

Hi Roland, a useful list. ... You could add Gobstopper to it:

''Gobstopper a better than Sungold cherry? De-hybridization starting from Sungold F1, bred by Madeline McKeever, Ireland. Yellow-green cherry tomato with semi-transparent skin. Very special looks. Very good taste, fruity and sweet with the texture of a grape. Indeterminate with regular foliage. Good yields in mid-season. The first fruits are reasonably early.''

[Adrian]

Hi,
If it can help you
https://www.tomatofifou.com/?s=Sungold&post_type=product

Sungold has 4 parents among one red
parent.
We know that it has one beta parent.
Probably habrochaites or other solanum parent has it feel different that lycopersicum parent
But for the 4th parent i don't know

[Steph S]

Hi Vicky and welcome to the forum.

Adrian makes a good point that Sungold is a Beta orange.
So although you will find lots of other fruity flavors in yellow, tangerine orange, and bicolor plants, any crosses with those will complicate the results, producing many extra filials that are not orange along the way.

I have not actually tested the cross of Beta orange and bicolor, but my understanding is that Beta orange is only expressed in a red background.  You need red at the red/yellow/bicolor locus for Beta to be expressed.
Red or pink or purple-black or brown-black parent are all okay for recovering Beta at reasonable rates, but yellow in a cross would be quite lossy, depending only on the allele for red from the Sungold related parent.  You would end up with a lot of yellow fruited plants, which is not all bad, lots of them are 'fruity' anyway and you might find the Sungold taste genetics interesting in that background, but the Sungold obsessed spouse is less likely to accept the difference (basing that assumption on my experience of a Sungold obsessed friend!). 
I'm assuming that bicolor x Beta would be the same as yellow in results, ie you have just 1 Red allele from the Beta expressing parent, reducing the chances that Beta and R occur together and requiring to grow more plants to find them.
Tangerine orange expresses in yellow or red or bicolor background, but it may be difficult to tell which allele is present, so ymmv but overall there will be fewer orange offspring and you'll have the headache of figuring out whether the orange is Beta (with a red allele present) or tangerine.  These types of orange are on unrelated locus, the alleles do not combine to make an orange fruit.  So it's strictly either or.  I'm not sure what happens when BOTH are present ie BBRRtt, which pathway overrides the other.  So if you did get an early generation Beta fruit, it might have a single recessive t lurking, thus possible to switch from B to t orange in a further generation, if tt cuts off the Beta path.  And a promising taste could change completely. WRT the variety of fruity tastes,  although taste is complex involving many genes, the pigments probably do contribute something to taste, and I think beta carotene is quite different tasting than prolycopene.

You'll be fine to recover orange fruit with any Beta parents (such as Jaune Flamme) as well as any of the Sungold OP descendants and their related F1s (such as Sunsugar, afaik), which have the best shot at reproducing a Sungold fruitiness anyway.  Also wild tomatoes or their descendants which are orange, likely are expressing the Beta orange from their wild heritage, and would produce the same orange as Sungold.
I've read speculation about Sungold having a wild ancestor in its parent lineage, and certainly seems likely based on the foliage smell and also the novel taste profiles that emerge from wild descent, you might find the key to the taste quest there.  Ambrosia Gold iirc has some wild ancestry in addition to Sungold?
https://jandlgardens.com/


Just a tip about expensive seeds - if I was growing Sungold and wanted more bang for my buck, I would take the low suckers from a small set of grown-from-seed plants and root them in water, to quickly make more Sungold plants.  Sungold is so early that there should be plenty of time for those extra plants to catch up.

[Vicki]

Thanks all for great lists of other OP Sungold dehybridizations (and more websites and resources to investigate).

From what I'm reading, trying to attain a Sungold equivalent in terms of flavor will best be suited to a different project than my general search for "fruity" flavors, with back crossing with the OP Sungold descendants or other beta orange tomatoes if the flavor gets lost.

But in searching for fruity flavors, crosses with OP Sungold descendants could also be interesting. I'd like a larger range of fruity notes to begin crossing with, so I still need to trial all sorts of tomatoes, including those of different colors.

I do agree color has something to do with taste, but it seems like a complex relationship.

I agree with Kaguya that I am afraid of getting overwhelmed, so I think I will end up deciding whether to pursue the Sungold equivalent or exploring fruity tastes next year. I'm leaning towards overall fruity and sticking to the original plan of trialing a variety of fruity tomatoes next year, although now after reading all your good ideas I may throw in a few Sungold descendants as well.

Also, great tip about rooting cuttings and even overwintering them. I don't know why I didn't think of that!