Tomato or potato?

[hoodat]

I'm scratching my head over a volunteer that popped up in my garden. It started from a seedling that looked like a tomato but the adult leaves look like a potato. I grew several potato leaf tomato varieties in my garden last year so I thought the seed came from one of them but the bigger the plant gets the more it looks like a potato. If it would bloom I'd know for sure but in the meantime I guess I just wait and see. It's possible to grow potatos from seed but I've never had one volunteer and I didn't grow potatos last year so I don't know where the seed would have come from. It was definitely a seedling, not a sprout that came from a peel.

 

[Mickey328]

A mystery! One of the lovely joys of gardening

 

[897tgigvib]

Oh the joys of gardening down there by San Diego! Your season probably starts the day after the previous season ended!

 

[Ridgerunner]

Life's full of mysteries if you are out doing things where you can actually see them and recognize them. Things just don't happen to people that don't do anything. Things obviously happen to you. I think it's a better way to live.

I've never grown a potato from seed. Wonder if a bird or bat may have dropped it?

 

[hoodat]

One other thing that makes me think potato is that I don't think a tomato plant would be growing this fast at this time of year. If it turns out to be a tomato I may have a good cold weather variety come from it.

 

[digitS']

I've decided to pay a little more attention to what the seed catalogs say about "cold weather" tomato performance, Hoodat. It just used to seem to me to be so much hype but I now realize that some varieties have trouble doing much of anything, including growing & setting fruit, during cool conditions.

No tomato plant can withstand a frost - I think I've proven that cool-season Bloody Butchers cannot even live thru sudden, near-freezing conditions. Potatoes will grow when it is cool but I've had frost-damaged foliage on them several times. They grow back, of course. San Diego must be beyond even near-freezing conditions? Won't you have a frost in January?

Somehow, I think you will find that you have a very vigorous tomato. If you can spare the room to grow it, finding out what it can produce could be very interesting.

Another thing I seem to be learning is that these heirloom tomato varieties could almost be better described as "gene pools." The plants vary and there must be strains with differing characteristics.

Steve

 

[HunkieDorie23]

Hoodat it may not even be from your garden. My sister in law got a mini pumpkin in their garden 3 or 4 years ago and they had never planted pumpkins of any type. We had guessed that a bird dropped it or something. She always puts seed out for the squirrels usually peanuts but at times she has put out seed mixes. I am not sure if there was some pumpkin seeds in that and a squirrel might have planted it for them. She gave my daughter three little pumpkins from the plant. The next year I planted some of the seeds and she had mini pumpkins a second year.

Volunteers are always fun surprises.

 

[so lucky]

Birds do drop some strange things. Once I got hit on the head by a little mussel shell dropped by a passing bird. I don't know if it was aiming for me or not. lol We don't live any where near a creek that supports mussels, by the way.

 

[897tgigvib]

Speaking of birds dropping things, aimed or not, always reminds me of back when I was in the Army band.

At San Francisco we were playing at a funeral for some retired General in the Presidio cemetary. In full dress blues.

While playing a beautiful song something suddenly hit my cap and shoulder, and something clammy and wet was on my chin.

Oh ****, but we kept playing without missing a beat. After we were at parade rest, and then slowly marched off I saw, we saw, what it was, eeew! It sure must have been a big seagull!

Luckily there were spare blues tops because we went straight from there to a banquet to perform. I'll never forget that incident!

 

[HunkieDorie23]

When we lived in GA we had some nice GA Pines in the front yard and the squirrels to go with them. They used to eat the pine nuts out of the pine cones and if you were outside they would throw them at you. At first we thought it was accidental but we were outside plenty and sometimes with neighbors over and you would move to a different spot in the yard and you were still getting pelted with the pine cones.

Unlike my sister in law I do not feed the little monsters.