Pomme d'amour

Today, tomatoes are grown, cultivated and harvested worldwide not only for their tender fruit, but for ornamental purposes as well. However,  this has not always been the case for the pomme d'amour, or "Love Apple" as the French so elegantly described it. Only within the past one hundred or so years has it come into fruition as an edible entity in the United States. Before this time, partly due the unpleasant odor of the stem and leaves, the tomato was thought to be poisonous and unfit for food.

Tomatoes are warm season, half-hardy crops that belong to the Solanaceae Family along with peppers, eggplant, potato and other members that are in fact poisonous. Within the state of Florida alone, the total acreage planted for tomato production yearly ranges anywhere from 32,000 - 44,000 acres with an average yield of about fourteen hundred 25-lbs cartons per planted acre. 

The photo below is two out of four transplanted cultivars called Tribute, which were planted 3-weeks ago. This weekend, I applied 56.7 grams of Nature Safe organic fertilizer around the base of each plant. It's important not to apply fertilizer to the leaves or stem directly, as fertilizers contain salts which can desiccate or "burn" the plant, ultimately killing it in as little as three days.