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TomTato, the Hybrid Plant: Half Tomato, Half Potato

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“Veg plot in a pot” – a new plant that produces both potatoes and tomatoes, has been developed in the United Kingdom and released for sale this September. It’s called TomTato because it can produce sweet cherry tomatoes in its branches while growing white potatoes as its root. Similar potato-tomato plants have been developed in the UK before, but this is the first time they are available for wider market. For only £14.99 (around 24USD) each, anyone can mail-order these individually hand-crafted plants at Thompson&Morgan.

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Photo credit: Thompson & Morgan

Paul Hansord, horticultural director at the company, said that he got the idea of TomTato for the first time in late 1990’s in US, when he visited a garden where somebody had planted a potato right under a tomato as a joke. It took several years of trial and error to develop what is now known as TomTato. It was created through a process of combining two different plants to create a single one. This process is also known as grafting. It requires very skilled gardeners to be successful with creating a clean cut of two plants and taping the ends together. There is a chance that plants could reject each other or don’t heal after. Luckily, potatoes and tomatoes are both nightshades. If both plants involved in grafting are from the same genus, the success chance is significantly higher. One of the most difficult parts of creating TomTato was working on creating the same stem sickness for both tomato and potato plant so the grafting would work. Some critics pointed out the obvious problem, which has raised from similar experiments. The idea of the plant is lovely, but wouldn’t harvesting potatoes destroy the tomato part of the plant. TomTato plant lasts only for a season. However, by the time potatoes are ripe, tomatoes are ready for picking up too. From harvesting one plant you can have a dish of fries with ketchup!

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Photo credit: Thompson & Morgan

What makes TomTato such a good product? How modern consumers can benefit from it? First, not many people have spacious gardens to grow produce. TomTato can help significantly with saving space. You can grown your TomTato outdoors or indoors in a regular 40 liter pot or bag. That’s not where the benefits of this strange plant ends. It’s a plant intended to be eaten, and botanists at Thompson&Morgan have worked hard to make the fruit and roots of TomTato delicious. In fact, they have worked so hard, that the cherry tomatoes that this plant produces are much sweeter than most available on the market. The root is also a good, hearty crop of white potatoes. The previous experiments with potato and tomato grafting weren’t this successful when it came to the taste of the plant.

At the moment company produces up to 34,000 individual hand-grafted TomTatos annually. Double-crop pants like this can be very useful in the future as the human population grows, and food production will need to be more efficient to feed all the new mouths. Kati Kati nursery in New Zealand has come up with similar product, named Potato Tom this week too. This was a coincidence, but it clearly shows the tendencies for what the world needs in food production – efficient food that can also provide good flavor.

The post TomTato, the Hybrid Plant: Half Tomato, Half Potato appeared first on Green Buzz - Environmental Blog.


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