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I asked a question about this plant earlier. It appears to be either indeterminate or semi-determinate as I've already harvested three tomatoes (on August 31) and the plant is flowering again. I live in Southern California, so frost probably won't be an issue. I hope I get another two or three fruit this year.

In reference to Peter Turner's answer, the seeds didn't look like the Husky Hybrid seeds in the picture, though I don't know exactly what distinguishing features I ought to be looking for. Fortunately, my wife took pictures of the fruit:

whole tomato

The scale is hard to gauge from this shot, but the fruit are a touch smaller than a billiard ball. I'm not really sure what caused the cracks in the skin, but only two of the fruit had them. More intriguing to me is the cross-section:

tomato cross-section

As you can see (blurrily), the tomato had two layers of seeds separated by a layer of flesh. I believe all three tomatoes had double-layers of seeds.

I'm not a tomato fan, but the taste I tried was especially sweet and didn't have as much of the "tomato taste" that I dislike in commercial tomatoes.

I keep forgetting to take a photo of the plant itself and I don't really know what to say about the appearance except that it's a tomato plant. Is this enough to go by?

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    If you have another intact fruit, could you take a picture of a horizontal section of it (i.e., cut it in two along the equator assuming the part attached to the stem is the pole)? I'd like to see how many seed chambers there are and how they're distributed. This could probably be a rare case where the chambers have moved around/fused or it could be one cultivar there are several chambers instead of the normal 3-5...
    – Lorem Ipsum
    Oct 7, 2011 at 1:26
  • Sadly, the first round is long gone and the second round is just starting. I'll try to remember when we get another harvest.
    – Jon 'links in bio' Ericson
    Oct 7, 2011 at 3:16
  • As yoda suggested, cut it horizontally next time. This may not be strange at all; I suspect that if you cut it across the middle, it will have a star shape, in which case, it is normal. The bizarre appearance is merely a side-effect of the way you just happened have to cut it (sort of like taking a cross-section of a four-dimensional object; it can look drastically different depending on the position and angle of the cut). -- Melody
    – Synetech
    Feb 23, 2012 at 20:21

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When I saw the pictures here I wondered if it was a form of siamese twinning where one is basically growing inside the other. As with human siamese twins the most common ones we think of are those joined at the hip, but the less obvious ones are just a bit of alien tooth or heart cells within one child.

A genetically distinct plant which has experienced a mutation from regular tomatoes, which massively increases the likelihood of siamese twinning in the fruit could display this kind of arrangement.

Now that may sound bizarre. I certainly thought so myself, so I tested the theory by consulting Lord Google... and it does appear that it's not too uncommon according to this post on Accidental Green Thumb. See also this post by Herbgardener.

If the siamese twin theory seems too far fetched it's still possible it's some other mutation. And since you say the fruit is delicious and it's still clearly attractive, you could cultivate this one over many generations and make a packet by mass marketing it!

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  • The pictures on those sites are nothing like what we got, for what it's worth. This is more like one tomato growing inside another, but with just one layer of skin.
    – Jon 'links in bio' Ericson
    Oct 19, 2011 at 23:34
  • In the linked stories of siamese-twinned tomatoes there is no layer of skin between the twins amongst the fleshy part. If this was a siamese-twinned tomato growing wholly inside its twin then I'm doubtful you would expect to find another layer of skin inside.
    – Lisa
    Nov 2, 2011 at 23:04
  • > This is more like one tomato growing inside another @Jon Ericson, that could explain the bursting. This was not an isolated incident? That is, there have been a few tomatoes that exhibited this? Were they all from the same plant?
    – Synetech
    Feb 23, 2012 at 20:05
  • @Synetech: It was three tomatoes, all from the same plant and the same harvest. My most recent harvest was just one, tiny fruit that was scarred over. I think some sort of rodent attacked it and it healed over.
    – Jon 'links in bio' Ericson
    Feb 23, 2012 at 20:08

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