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Perennial tomato plants
There's a bunch of plants that bear fruit common to our kitchen that belong to the same plant family; Solanaceae. The potato plant and tomato plant belong to this family; as does the pepper plant and aubergine (Am. eggplant). Belladonna, Henbane and Mandrake, Petunia and Tobacco plant are also in this family.
I recently heard that tomato seeds are going to be really expensive next this / next year because of transportation problems. I like to drink hot chocolate instead of caffeinated drinks but cacao prices have rocketed over the last couple of years, and costs drive me away from cocoa drinks. I don't think England is warm enough for me to grow a cacao tree yet, but I am aiming at producing year-round tomatoes. But I might have to trick the plants into mutating a bit.
I grow tomato plants from seeds each year; this year I tried a heritage variety but cross-fertilisation produced the wrong tomato.
A year or two ago, I bought cheap tomato seeds from Simply Seeds. Pepper and Tomato seeds look very similar to one another and out of about forty germinations two were pepper plants. One YouTube video told me that pepper plants are perennials - you lift them before the frost gets them and store them in a dark cupboard so they can hibernate, I think.
I have noticed that the weird weather in the UK fools many of my plants. I have had strawberry plants flowering in October and tomato plants that should die after producing their fruit, stay alive. Tomato plants are either indeterminate or determinate in their growth. Indeterminate, like Money Maker tomato plants, keep growing and growing, like bushes. These are the sort that Grandad pricks out the new shoots from the stems; ostensibly to force the plant to send nutrients to producing fruit. I think it is because frost kills tomato plants.
I have a young 30cm tomato plant that germinated a few weeks ago. The dry air also prevented many of my tomato plants from producing fruit and growing bigger this year. However, this Autumn, some of them are invigorated by more humid air; like, I suppose they had the nutrients but not the intent. Clever plants! I have decided to grown on the young tomato plant and one of the determinate tomato plants that is supposed to die after producing its fruit, which it should produce all in one showing. That showing should have been months ago, yet I picked the last tomato from it yesterday. Strangely, it has recently produced side shoots that are producing flowers. This means that it is, I think, in its second year of life. Did the dry air of Summer trick it into thinking there was a very warm Winter?
So, I have a pepper plant producing flowers, a young tomato plant producing flowers and a determinate tomato plant, which I know to be a Rio Grande type, making new growth and producing flowers; all at the wrong time of year. I shall bring them in and grow them on, on one of my window sills. (In England, windowsills are on both inside and outside of our rooms. The inside ones are wide and level enough to put things on). I just remembered that one of the heritage tomato plants (determinate) is producing new side shoots, so i shall have to dig that one up too and bring it inside. I am hoping that because it is more wild than the others as in less husbandry, that it will, through cross-fertilisation, produce fruit that has seeds for perennial plants. Already, it didn't produce purple fruit, like it should have done.
I am hoping that I have two perennial tomato plants and a perennial pepper plant but I may have to find and buy another pepper plant to keep it company, despite pepper and tomato plants being in the same family.
Many people bemoan climate change as calamitous but I think they do this very much from their dominant human position. 'I love my planet' and 'Saving the World' means taking the comfort of humans out of the solution, surely.