Man, if you ever want to eat 10,000 tomatoes in a season, plant yourself a Spoon Tomato.

I made the mistake of growing two of these last summer, and each grew up, over, and across the length of my trellis arch, about 20’ in length. To keep them from utterly smothering their neighbors required pruning fistfuls of vines literally daily.

It’s insanely prolific in fruits too, I gave up harvesting them all when I was picking hundreds a day. That sounds great, but each is the size of a pea or smaller, and they had the tendency to split at the top rather than keeping their caps, so they didn’t store well at all.

The flipside is they do have a great tart, intense tomato flavor. I mostly ate them as garden snacks, or sprinkled on salads or focaccia.

[Image description: a small metal spoon holding a dozen tiny, bright red round cherry tomatoes. Green tomatoes and flowers are seen on the vine adjacent to the spoon.]

  • Sludgehammer@lemmy.world
    3·
    1 year ago

    The funny thing is that species (Solanum pimpinellifolium) is the ancestor of all varieties of tomatoes.

    Edit: Actually, thinking a bit more “all varieties” is a bit of a broad statement to make. There are other species of wild Solanum that are sexually compatible with tomatoes which have been used in breeding, so some tomato breeds might have a bit of DNA from other species. But most of the genetics of modern tomatoes breeds are descended from Solanum pimpinellifolium.