The Curious Case of the Tomatoes in the Tomato
Posted on | October 8, 2009 | No Comments
Here’s a weird one.
Yesterday I went down into what remains of the vegetable garden to see what was usable for dinner. I found a couple of nice eggplants, plenty of basil and half a dozen ripe–heading towards over-ripe–tomatoes, so I decided to make Eggplant Parmesan. I picked the fruit and headed back to the kitchen.
I like fresh stewed tomatoes in my sauce, so I boiled some water and dropped the tomatoes in to blanch them and remove the skin.
As I pulled the last tomato from the ice water I noticed a number of dark spots under it’s skin. No big deal, I thought. I can cut the spots out. But when I removed the skin, I found that they weren’t dark spots at all, but long green strings coiled in the fruit.
Did I just blanch worms in a tomato?
Nope. A little digging revealed that the long green strings were, in fact, tomato seedlings that had sprouted inside the fruit!
Tomatoes growing in a tomato (click for large image)
Now I’ve seen thing in tomatoes that have fallen off the vine (heck, my garden is full of “volunteers” sprouting from old fruit I failed to pick up), but never in one still firmly attached to a still-producing plant.
My best guess is the sudden change in weather (two weeks ago it hadn’t been below 80° in three months; but we’ve been in the mid 60s ever since) and declining hours of sun caused the tomato plant to stop maturing the fruit on the older, lower branches, sending a signal to the seeds in the tomato that the fruit had dropped to the ground. Since it’s still warm enough for tomato seeds to sprout and the fruit was plenty moist, they did just that.
Weird, huh? I kind of wish that I had discovered the tomato a few days later when the seedlings might have erupted. Now that would have been a sight.
Anyone else ever seen anything like this?
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