Tomatoes
Botanical Name: Solanum lycopersicum
Family: Solanaceae
Also Known As: “death apple” by my brother, “the ugliest plant in the world” by my mother
Origin: native to South America
Source: Commonsense Organics and Oakdale Organics
Tomatoes contain the anticholinesterase, tomatine. But most of it is found in the leaves of the plant, not the fruit. George Ohsawa, Macrobiotics, felt though that the tomato’s fruit was the original and literal deadly “forbidden fruit†or the forbidden apple, and knew that it was referred to as the “death apple,†the pome da mort. Even though Robert Graves has pointed out that pome da mort, was a mishearing or misreading of pomme d’amour, the apple of love rather than the apple of death, maybe Ohsawa was on to something and it was Graves who got it wrong. — Stephan Cooter, Ph.D., Deadly Alkali salts in Pesticides (Whoah — fascinating article. I didn’t know biological basis why nightshades are considered dangerous.)
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- 30.12.2009 Brought home lovely — no, beautiful — seedlings of roma, beefsteak and cherry tomatoes from Commonsense Organics and left them outside before planting — the wind tosed everything out and I was able to salvage the seedlings, but not identify which was which. I might have left them inside, but my mother curiously went off on how tomato plants were so ugly (where did that come from?) and I didn’t think they should be around that kind of talk.
- 28.02.2010 The romas were the first to develop, and I still couldn’t identify them with certainty until today I saw both beefsteak and cherry tomatoes as well. Yay! One plant didn’t make it at all and was replaced with an intriguing heirloom variety from Oakdale Organics. I’m a huge fan of heirloom tomatoes (as you can see below), the stranger looking the more enticing… next year will have time to start more from seed.
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