Man, if you ever want to eat 10,000 tomatoes in a season, plant yourself a Spoon Tomato.

I made the mistake of growing two of these last summer, and each grew up, over, and across the length of my trellis arch, about 20’ in length. To keep them from utterly smothering their neighbors required pruning fistfuls of vines literally daily.

It’s insanely prolific in fruits too, I gave up harvesting them all when I was picking hundreds a day. That sounds great, but each is the size of a pea or smaller, and they had the tendency to split at the top rather than keeping their caps, so they didn’t store well at all.

The flipside is they do have a great tart, intense tomato flavor. I mostly ate them as garden snacks, or sprinkled on salads or focaccia.

[Image description: a small metal spoon holding a dozen tiny, bright red round cherry tomatoes. Green tomatoes and flowers are seen on the vine adjacent to the spoon.]

  • @Sludgehammer
    3•1 year ago

    The funny thing is that species (Solanum pimpinellifolium) is the ancestor of all varieties of tomatoes.

    Edit: Actually, thinking a bit more “all varieties” is a bit of a broad statement to make. There are other species of wild Solanum that are sexually compatible with tomatoes which have been used in breeding, so some tomato breeds might have a bit of DNA from other species. But most of the genetics of modern tomatoes breeds are descended from Solanum pimpinellifolium.

    • thrawnOPM
      2•1 year ago

      Well I see why our ancestors decided to cultivate them!

  • @Bearbie
    3•1 year ago

    Are they sweet or tart? I’d love a handful.

  • PopcornChickn
    2•1 year ago

    Kind of glad I accidentally killed these seedlings earlier this year.

  • Uprise42
    1•1 year ago

    Would this make a good tomato sauce? You mentioned them not keeping well due to splitting at the top, but if they were to be smashed/blended/strained quickly and are producing hundreds per day then you should be able to make a good sauce over a season right?

    • thrawnOPM
      1•1 year ago

      I’m sure you could, and it would taste great, but the level of effort it took to pick that number was just not worth my limited daily gardening time.

      Last year I kinda went insane with the number of tomato plants I grew, if you look at the community header, it’s a picture of my kitchen counter completely covered with tomatoes. At peak harvest, I was pulling out at least 100lbs of tomatoes a week. When you’ve got a dozen 2lb tomatoes to eat/process, plucking little micro ones becomes less appealing.