Fixing the Tomato

faethor

faethor

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I think we can all agree that Supermarket tomatoes are bland. They're often gassed to make them red and more appealing to buy. However, price wins over taste.

There are people out to fix that. They're surveying tastiness and overlying DNA to figure out what aspect of the fruit makes it the nummiest! I'd suspect the goal will be to combine robustness (for shipping, storage, and supermarket sales) along with flavor. One can imagine the company that cracks that equation will have a virutal goldmine on their hands.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/tomato-chemistry/#more-112318
 
You think that is something.

The tomato is a floozie around the garden.
It will share it's genes with a lot of things.

Found out the hard way when I planted tomatoes and cantaloupes too close together.
It didn't bother the cantaloupes at all, but you should have seen the tomatoes.

They were the proper size, but they looked like they were wearing cantaloupe skin.
They never turned red, and were as hard as a baseball.
I blamed the Bees, but the wife blamed the gardener.:wrong:
 
Fade said:
Found out the hard way when I planted tomatoes and cantaloupes too close together.
It didn't bother the cantaloupes at all, but you should have seen the tomatoes.

They were the proper size, but they looked like they were wearing cantaloupe skin.
They never turned red, and were as hard as a baseball.
I blamed the Bees, but the wife blamed the gardener.
Click to expand...

Cantaloupes are in the family Cucumis which include which includes the cucumber, true melons, the horned melon, and gherkin.

You developed a new GMO variety of tomatoes bearing cantalopes!

Natural GMO in Nature: Genes can migrate from plant to plant via grafts

A ScienceDirect report shows that passage of chloroplasts across grafted plant tissues is one mechanism for such so-called horizontal gene transfers between unrelated species
Click to expand...
 
Speaking of Gherkins. I made the mistake of planting some of those once. Never having grown them before, I decided bigger was better so I didn't try to pick them until they were 3 or 4 inches long. By then they had grown spines and it was like trying to pick the worst Cactus in the world.

Not only that, but every where the vines touched the ground, it put out new roots, and my two plants turned into about a hundred new plants and took over the whole garden. By August the wife and kids refused to even go into the garden because there was a spiny Gerkin hidden on, around, or under every other plant in the garden.

I eventually just gave it up, and left that garden to the critters.
 
Fade said:
I eventually just gave it up, and left that garden to the critters.
Click to expand...

I wish I had room to do that. My (aherm) "garden" is a tiny patch of dandelion-strewn grass, with a couple of small trees.
The only thing of any note is a little cherry tree I planted about seven years ago, which gets me a couple of bowls of cherries every summer.

On the other hand, most of my friends don't have a garden at all. Price of living near the city centre, I suppose.
 
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