Posts Tagged: tomato

Visalia paper investigates tomato-potato plant

A Tulare resident reported to the Visalia Times-Delta the appearance of a plant in his garden that is producing potatoes in the ground and tomatoes on the stems.

Reporter Hillary Meeks inquired with UC Cooperative Extension farm advisor Michelle LeStrange about a phenomenon the gardener said he has never seen before in 60 years of gardening. Le Strange said it could be a natural anomaly.

"Several types of mutations occur in nature and occasionally we can visually see the result," LeStrange wrote in an e-mail to the paper. "Anyway... it is a curiosity, but there are tons of plant curiosities out there in nature."

Meeks did some more digging on the Internet. A Texas A&M University horticulture website said cross-pollination of the two plants is impossible. A University of Illinois Extension article said potato and tomato plants can be integrated, but the results are unlikely to be successful.

Meeks also found grafted potato-tomato plants for sale on one website and directions how to do it yourself on ehow.com.

For information on growing potatoes, see the potato growing tips written by Le Strange and Master Gardener Clara Smith. A 10-page UC publication on growing tomatoes may be downloaded free from the UC ANR Catalog.

Tomato flowers and potato flowers look similar.

Taking the drudgery out of weed control

For automated, mechanical weed control to work, scientists must teach machines how to distinguish between unwanted vegetation and the crop being cultivated. A new, high-tech system using x-rays to detect tomato stems is under development by UC Davis Cooperative Extension agricultural engineer David Slaughter and USDA Agricultural Research Service researcher Ron Haff. The output from the x-ray detector is input to a microcontroller that controls a pair of pneumatically powered mechanical weed knife blades.

Slaughter and Haff's work was explained this week in an online newsletter produced by Vision Systems Design, an organization that provides automation solutions for engineers and integrators worldwide.

The mechanical weeding machine includes an x-ray mounted to the side of a shielded tunnel that is pulled behind a tractor over the row of tomato plants. As the x-rays radiate across the tunnel, they are detected by an array of 32 photodiodes whose output is tied to a single point at the input of a summing amplifier, the story says.

The system was used in field trials on a 15-meter row containing 39 standing tomato seedlings. At a speed of about 1 mile per hour, the detection system identified all 39 stems of standing plants with no false positives.

Tomato field infested with field bindweed.

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