A week ago I posted about the smallest of my tomato plants, one of the crop still struggling up from the seeds that I planted from the same packet at the same time, slightly late in the season.

The smallest of the plants is still not making much progress, but today I looked at the biggest of its siblings and discovered these tiny ‘love-apples’ hiding in amongst the leaves. The name love-apple is new to me, and only recently discovered thanks to an old Encylopaedia Britannica, published in 1797, (if I have got the Roman numerals right – MDCCXCVII). This was how it described the tomato, entered under ‘solanum’.

We may have added to the way we eat tomatoes since this entry was listed but, as far as I can discover, they are still classified botanically as berries.

A final piece of tomato trivia that I found out from more recent online sources, is that the world’s largest producer of tomatoes, by far, is China.

Copyright Georgie Knaggs & The Phraser 2023