Wild tomatoes offer vegetable gardeners a chance to go back to the fruit’s original roots. Here’s how to tame some for your garden.
Wild tomatoes started out as humble berry growing on bushes somewhere in South America . Some food for thought historians consider the plants took root along the warm coastal regions of Ecuador and Peru . Others think the plant and fruits were first found growing in the Andes Mountains .
Long before the first foreigner go far from Spain , the pre - Mayan mass in Central America had domesticated the waste works and tamed its yield . Then traveller took the seed and helped scatter them around the Earth .
Today ’s vegetable gardener can still get a taste sensation of those early tomatoes by plantingMatt ’s Wild Cherry tomato plant . Southern Exposure Seed Exchange offer package of these wild tomato semen that are enjoin to have been ” collected in the wild near Hildago in Mexico . ”
I catch my hands on a few of these seeds to see how they compared to mod cherry tomatoes . I started the seeds indoors in March and moved two plant out of doors in other June . That ’s when they took off .
The vines are especially long and require to be staked to keep them from sprawl along the soil . It need only 60 days from transplanting to the first harvesting of small ½ ” tomatoes . Although they are smaller than what most gardeners consider“cherry ” sizing , they throng a abstruse love apple taste . Each is just a small chomp , but there are pot on the plant to enjoy .
I compare these wild tomatoes with two other diminished tomatoes : Litt’l Bites Cherry Windowbox tomatoesfrom Renee ’s Garden andTiny Tim , a dwarf heirloom from seeds I ’ve saved over the class .
While all three plants produced delicious fruit , it seems a niggling unfair to compare the larger and tamer tomato to the raving mad one . But it ’s important to keep implant , growing and corrode these pint - sized fruits . After all , it ’s one of the groundless antecedent of all the Lycopersicon esculentum we delight today .
If you ’ve grown any raving mad love apple , please share your experience here !
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Wild cherry tomatoes are smaller than Tiny Tim (on left) and Litt’l Bites, but they offer gardeners a chance to taste one of the wild ancestors of all the tomatoes we grow today.Photo/Illustration: Jodi Torpey
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