Setting up a vegetable garden is fun and all, but wouldn’t a freaky garden filled with Frankenstein plants be more along your style? Yeah, leave the conventional gardens to the neighborhood moms and plant yourself some TomTatos instead.
Created by UK horticulture company Thompson and Morgan, it’s a hybrid plant that produces both tomatoes and potatoes. No, not a single fruit that combines the two, but two separate ones — future french fries on the roots and future pasta sauce on the stems. Designed for small gardens with limited growing spaces, it allows you to grow two types of vegetables in an area that would have otherwise limited you to a single produce.
When we see Frankensteined plants, we immediately think GMO. If that worries you, the TomTato shouldn’t — it’s actually been produced by grafting the upper part of a cherry tomato plant with the bottom end of a white potato plant, with no genetic engineering involved. Because it’s an all-natural Frankenstein plant rather than a genetically modified one, you can’t buy it in seed form. Instead, you get it as a grown plant that can last for one growing season, wtih the ability to produce up to 500 tomatoes and up to 4.4 pounds of potatoes.
The plant produces tomatoes with a Brix level of 10.2, making them sweeter and more delicious than most tomatoes you can get off supermarket aisles. The potatoes are just like any of the ones your friends grow in their own vegetable gardens, so you can boil them, mash them, or turn them into crispy chips.
The TomTato is available as a 9cm potted plant, priced at £14.99.