Time for Tea & Toast and my friends the TOMATOES

This post, 'Time for T' - was originally uploaded and written by Tyra at the blog The greenhouse in Tyra's Garden http://tyras-greenhouse.blogspot.com/ABC Wednesday this week it is T for ...Tomato.

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Time for Tea & Toast and my friends the Tomatoes!

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This week’s letter on ABC Wednesday is T as in Tyra no...my T just has to be TOMATO.

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Tomatoes are some of my friends in the greenhouse, yes they are my friends. I have just been out having my breakfast there, Tea and Toast. while doing some tomato pollination :-) Late last night I made a nice loaf of what I call country-bread, a rustic loaf made with sour dough, wheat of spelt Triticum spelta, rye whole flour, raisins and a bunch of nuts and seeds.

T as in Tea and Toast.



Now to the tomato, they are coming along just fine in the greenhouse, I have a lot of flowers and a few small tomatoes, still green of course. The biggest one is Solanum Lycopersicum’ Cherokee purple’ a heirloom and this is how the flowers looks like. This tomato is a beefsteak type tomato, dusky red in the colour with green shoulders. It is the first time I'm growing this Cherookee purple and it is going to be so exciting to see how it turns out.


This is a collage from last years tomatoes.

I have made a small evaluation of them here:
Tomatoes Tyra's Garden 2008




Early history


Aztecs and other peoples in the region used the fruit in their cooking; it was being cultivated in southern Mexico and probably other areas by 500BC. It is thought that the Pueblo people believed that those who witnessed the ingestion of tomato seeds were blessed with powers of divination. The large, lumpy tomato, a mutation from a smoother, smaller fruit, originated and was encouraged in Mesoamerica. Smith states this variant is the direct ancestor of some modern cultivated tomatoes.
According to Andrew F Smith's The Tomato in America, the tomato probably originated in the highlands of the west coast of South America. However, Smith notes there is no evidence the tomato was cultivated or even eaten in Peru before the Spanish arrived.
Two modern tomato cultivar groups, one represented by the Matt's Wild Cherry tomato, the other by currant tomatoes, originate by recent domestication of the wild tomato plants apparently native to eastern Mexico. This text ‘Early history’ is from wikipedia.
Read more about the most fascinating story of this plant here

Read about more great ABC Wednesday's T here.
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Have a great Wednesday my friends!

LOLove Tyra