Potato-Tomato Plant.

Horowhenua Chronicle, 27 April 1910, Page 4

Potato-Tomato Plant.

SUCCESSFUL COMBINATION

In an article on Irish blight in tomatoes, recently, the Victorian vegetable pathologist, Mr D. McAlpine, stated, as showing tho closeness of the relationship between the potato and the tomato, that the one could be grafted on to the other so effectively that both tubers and fruit would he produced by the same plant. The history of this plant is recorded by Dr Karl Snell as follows:— Potatoes were planted in pots on June 1, and on -JunelO one of the young potato haulms which had developed three shoots had a young tomato plant grafted on to it. The grafting was done in the usual manner by cleft-grafting. On July 4 the plants were removed from the pots and planted out in the garden, where they remained until they ripened. One of the plants at the end of October was bearing 18 tomatoes and 11 potatoes. The foliage was almost exclusively that of the tomato, and these leaves supplied the nourishment, not only for the tomato, but for the potato. Tims, from the same nutritive material, two quite different pants of different .plants were nourished—the succulent fleshy fruit of the tomato and the firm starchy tubers of the potato. There wns no blending of the properties of tho two. Just as in $he case of n pe;acli shoot grafted on the rooted stem of a plum, the shoot continues to develop the leaves, flowers and fruits of the peach, as long as it lives, ami if a shoot of the plum stock were allowed to grow, even after 20 vears' union with the peach, it would be found to produce only the normal leaves, flowers and fruits of a plum.