For a few months now, I’ve had a humble little compost pile on my balcony. All kinds of stale/overripe veggies, fruits and breads have gone into it. Tonight I took off the lid to moisten the soil after leaving it unattended for a few days, and encountered this healthy little nipper:
(sorry about the blurriness, my camera’s batteries are nearly dead).
I’m not very good at identifying leafy green things, but would anyone know what it might be? I’m kind of hoping that it’s something that will produce tasty items. Things I’ve put in the bin that had seeds were: Tomatoes, strawberries, apricots, and multigrain bread (which contained sunflower and flax seeds for sure, not sure what else). I eat a lot of organic stuff so I guess there’s a good chance any seeds could have been fertile. Or, could it be just a sprout from a wandering seed that blew in on the wind?
Yeah, I’m guessing tomato also. They’re tenacious. (The other day I was walking past a gone-out-of-business restaurant, and noticed a flourishing tomato plant growing out of the crack between the pavement and the wall of the door next to what had presumably been the kitchen exit.)
If it is Ground Elder, it shouldn’t have a tomato-ey smell. If it is Ground Elder, beware; it’s a most tenacious weed and hard to get rid of once it roots in your garden.
Another vote for tomato. Looks like a cluster of plants – much as one would expect in a compost pile, where a rotting tomato deposited a clump of seeds.
Dang sure looks like a tomato to me. I’ve been composting for years, using a three-bin setup, and have had tomatoes, potatoes, squash, cucumbers and even corn pop up in the pile. I use a cold-composting method, so this is not uncommon. Transplant it if you want, and use some of your finished compost if it’s ready. You mentioned a balcony; do you live in the city? If so, congrats on composting! It’s much easier to do than most folks think, even if you don’t have a lot of space. Thanks for helping reduce landfill space…
Either it’s not a tomato or it’s been there more than a 3 or 4 days. There is a large variation of leaves in tomato varieties, so tomato is a likely candidate. I can’t see it being anything else you listed. Unless your bin is in a greenhouse, don’t expect tomatoes before the cold gets them.
I would suspect those wee plants to Lycopersicum eculentum, the Love Apple.
(Yup, tomato) Rub some tobacco on it and wait for a week to see what happens. That will certainly differentiate it from the Goutweed mentioned in an earlier post.
If it is a tomato plant (which would be my guess, too), it’ll probably produce cherry tomatoes. That’s the wild state of the plant; the varieties that produce the bigger ones don’t breed true. They’re still perfectly edible and will taste just fine (far better than the tomatoes you get at the grocery store).
But if it’s a tomato, it also almost certainly won’t last long enough to fruit. Around here, you have to plant tomatoes as soon as possible after the last frost to get a chance of any fruit, and you’re probably even further north, so your growing season is probably even shorter. Sadly, the frost will likely do it in some time in the next few weeks.
Funny thing about compost. If you read gardening books they always warn you to be careful with it: fresh compost can burn your tender seedlings! Then I look in the compost pile and see all kinds of things are sprouting and growing like crazy in pure compost.
Especially tomatoes. I don’t think you can over fertilize those buggers.
Yes, but they’re growing in the top of the pile. Down in the core is where it gets hot, and if you’re shoveling out large amounts at once, you might get to that hot core.
Although wild tomatoes are indeed smaller, cultivated tomatoes will not instantly revert to their original form. Many years of selective breeding have created reliable varieties far removed from their ancestors which do come true from seed. The heirloom tomato craze is capitalizing on this fact. Many of the grocery store tomatoes are the reuslt of first generation hybrids that produce vigourous and predictable plants whose offspring will not resemble their parents.
Not to hijack, but I’ve heard this before about various fruits ‘not breeding true’ and I just don’t get it. How can this happen? DNA is DNA. It shouldn’t matter whether it grew from a seed or a shoot or however it’s propagated. I’m expressing rhetorical doubt here; I understand there must be something to it or else I wouldn’t have heard reputable gardeners talking about it.
Hybrids will produce seeds that can be like either parent used to produce the hybrid, the hybrid, or something different from these three if it cross pollinates with a new variety.
Non hybrids will produce the same variety with only slight variation if it doesn’t cross pollinate with a different variety. The slight variation is what makes breeding a shorter season or different color of a variety possible. When you breed for a characteristic long enough you have a new variety.
