A plant that has been said to grow both sweet cherry tomatoes and white potatoes, has been launched for sale in the UK.
Called the TomTato plant, it can grow up to 500 sweet cherry tomatoes while simultaneously producing white potatoes. This one-pot vegetable plot is being sold by Thompson & Morgan, a mail-order Horticulture company, for 14.99 pounds.
But what exactly is a Tomtato?
It isn't a new species of plant. It is instead a hybrid of two plants: the cherry tomato plant and the potato plant, both of which had been hand-grafted, rather than the popular belief that it has been genetically engineered.
These hybrid tomato-potato plants have been produced in the UK and elsewhere, but Thompson & Morgan say that this is the first time that they had been able to successfully produce the plant commercially.
The bizarre plant hybrid has light-hearted origins: Thompson & Morgan's horticultural director Paul Hansord says that he got the idea 15 years ago in a visit to a garden in the United States, where somebody had planted potatoes under a tomato plant as a little joke.
Hansord says that the TomTato had been several years in the making, and is extremely pleased at the results: "trusses full of tomatoes which have a flavor that makes shop tomatoes inedible, as well as a good hearty crop of potatoes for late in the season."
He then explains that the difficulty came with the grafting: "It has been very difficult to achieve the TomTato because the tomato stem and the potato stem have to be the same thickness for the graft to work, it is a very highly skilled operation."
He relates having encountered some similar potato-tomato plants over the years, only to realize upon closer inspection that they were merely two separate plants sharing the same pot.
"Our plant is one plant and produces no potato foliage," Hansord says.
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