Posted on 04/04/2017 4:44:54 PM PDT by vannrox
Ever wonder why most store-bought tomatoes are so tasteless? The answer (surprise, surprise) has to do with revenue: Tomato farmers care about yield, and the genetic variants associated with yield are not associated with tasty tomato flavors, a new study finds.
"Consumers complain that the modern tomato has little flavor. [It's] like a 'water bomb,'" said the study's co-principal investigator Sanwen Huang, the deputy director general at the Agricultural Genome Institute at Shenzhen at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.
How can farmers ditch this "water bomb" and reinstate the rich, sweet flavor of the tomato? To find out, Huang and colleagues investigated which genes are associated with tomatoes' taste.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
We had late blooming tomatoes into early December.
Cloning dilutes any plant if done enough
Don’t doubt me
Government Certified Organic is becoming a joke. Get some good heirloom seeds and grow your own.
If there is no easy way to get rid of the squirrels, you can feed them nuts at another end of the yard. This has helped us keep the squirrels from taking one bite of each orange and thus ruining the treeful.
Eh, hopefully I am not attracting an entire neighborhood of squirrels...
A few years ago, I had these bait bags that you put out for Japanese beetle, and I think I had half the county coming to my yard LOL I ended up cutting back on the grapevines (which were attracting them in the first place), and problem seems to have improved considerably.
Tomacco was originally a fictional plant that was a hybrid between tomatoes and tobacco, from a 1999 episode of The Simpsons titled “E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)”. The method used to create the tomacco in the episode is fictional. In the episode, the tomacco was accidentally created by Homer Simpson when he planted and fertilized his tomato and tobacco fields with plutonium. The result is a tomato that apparently has a dried, brown tobacco center, and, although being described as tasting terrible by many characters, is also immediately and powerfully addictive.
The creation is promptly labeled “tomacco” by Homer and sold in large quantities to unsuspecting passersby. A cigarette company, Laramie Tobacco Co., seeing the opportunity to legally sell their products to children, offers to buy the rights to market tomacco, but Homer demands one thousand times as much money as they wish to pay him, and the company withdraws.
Eventually, all of the tomacco plants are eaten by farm animals — except for the one remaining plant, which later goes down in an explosive helicopter crash with the cigarette company’s lawyers.
The process of making tomacco was first revealed in a 1959 Scientific American article, which stated that nicotine could be found in the tomato plant after grafting. Due to the academic and industrial importance of this breakthrough process, this article was reprinted in a 1968 Scientific American compilation.
A Simpsons fan, Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon, was inspired by the episode. Remembering the article in a textbook, Baur cultivated a tomacco in 2003 by grafting together tobacco and tomato plants. The plant produced fruit that looked like a normal tomato, but Baur suspected that it contained a lethal amount of nicotine and thus would be inedible. Testing later proved that the leaves of the plant contained some nicotine. Both plants are members of the same family, Solanaceae or nightshade. The tomacco plant bore tomaccoes until it died after 18 months, spending one winter indoors. Baur was featured on the “E-I-E-I-(Annoyed Grunt)” audio commentary in the Simpsons Season 11 DVD box set discussing the plant and resulting fame.
The 2004 convention of the American Dialect Society named tomacco as the new word “least likely to succeed.” Tomacco was a wordspy.com “Word of the Day”.
Tomacco juice is shown with Marge’s other groceries in the new opening theme. Also, there is a tomacco field in The Simpsons: Hit and Run.
The tomacco plant is also part of the Simpsons app Tapped Out and can be chosen to plant and grow on Cletus’ farm.
Yum, yum! Give me that and that’s all I need. Wouldn’t even miss the meat.
Get some good heirloom seeds and grow your own.
FTFY
As a certifiable tomatoholic, I concur!
There is nothing on this blessed planet better than a REAL tomato sangie!
I’m down to less than 10 quarts of the 400 lbs I canned last fall.
Summer can’t come soon enough!
We either have to grow them ourselves or get them from the market for that wonderful flavor. I hate not being able to buy good ones at the store.
I have made the same sandwich! I use Hellmann’s.
Heretic!
The PER unit cost of picking fruit/veg is almost nothing. You can’t compare picking a head of lettuce to hamburger making. The picking cost per head is 6 cents. If you DOUBLED the pay for field workers that cost would go to 12 cents. Would anyone notice on $2.59 head of lettuce?
Heretic!
Moi???
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