Why Honey Drop Cherry Tomato beats the rest.

Honey Drop is the cake of cherry tomatoes: an exceptionally sweet, well-flavored, and full-bodied tomato with substance. They are the ideal snacking tomato, small and mighty, with a fruity flavor and honey-like sweetness that the beloved hybrid Sungold variety just can’t match. Tevis and Rachel Robertson-Goldberg of Crabapple Farm in Chesterfield, MA, developed this variety, and we have selected it further to eliminate the reddish off-types.

Irresistible to all creatures who crave sweetness, we wanted the artwork for our new Honey Drop Cherry Tomato Art Pack to feature a lovable bear enjoying his honey (drops). Artist Marnie Jain’s work often includes animals -- we initially fell in love with her rabbits. She also already liked to tuck honeycomb textures into her collages, so it seemed a natural fit from the beginning.

We caught up with Marnie to learn more about her art and the inspiration behind her Honey Drop Cherry Tomato artwork.

 

Marnie, tell us a little about your artistic process. My medium is collage, and I enjoy using fashion magazines to deconstruct images and create completely new ones.  I cull through magazines for colors and textures to incorporate in my visions, but sometimes an idea presents itself unexpectedly.  For example, if I see a gorgeous orange, I might set aside my original task and create a new collage that features that color.  This work is reflective of my playfulness as an artist.  It is essential to never take oneself too seriously.

We love how the magazine collage allows you to capture the reflective shine of the tomatoes so well, which is a big part of what makes us what to pluck them off the vine! What are your favorite elements of the Honey Drop Cherry Tomato artwork? I could not bring myself to create the bear using photos of fur coats, so I sourced images of wood.  It is always fun to take the image of a hard object and transform it into something soft.  The inner mouth of the bear is a mix of deep pinks. I sourced that paper from a photo of flowers, which seemed in keeping with the gentle personality of this bear.

How do you interpret the relationship between art and seeds?     Nature is rife with color combinations and rich with design.  To me there is little separation between appreciating a painting in a museum and studying the tight orangey yellow skin of a tomato about to burst.  Both are sensory experiences that can be engaging and comforting.

We love how Marnie has given us this moment of worshipful craving and celestial aloofness between a hungry bear and the drooping, ambrosia-like fronds of Honey Drops. And we hope you'll agree that a gentle bear spending an afternoon eating Honey Drop Cherry Tomatoes is quite an endorsement of their sweetness!

How to Grow Honey Drop

Days to Maturity	70 days from transplant
Planting Depth	1/4 inch
Spacing in Row	18 to 24 inches
Spacing Between Rows	36 inches
Height at Maturity	60 inches

Start your seeds in a warm bright spot (supplemental light is recommended) indoors 4-6 weeks before last frost, then transplant to the garden after frost, when seedlings are at least 5" high. Honey Drops can grow quite tall, so support is necessary to keep plants healthy and manageable. Harvest the sweet, little, precious drops when they ripen to a golden, amber-yellow color.