The Sexually Frustrated Tomatillo

Until recently, I had one of the most sexually frustrated tomatillo plants I have ever seen.  In the past, I've grown tomatillos so I am familiar with the fact that tomatillos, like many other plants including spinach require another plant to be able to reproduce.  Somehow, in all of my seed planting I did this spring, I ended up with only one tomatillo plant, which I mistook for a pepper when planting it.  Needless to say, this last time around growing tomatillos in their native land has been an adventure worth sharing.  I'm struck with the similarity to cannabis farming here, as the goal is to sexually frustrate your plants so you get more flower and ideally no seed, sensimilla or sin similla. 

Tomatillos are a strange part of the solanacae family, comprised of eggplants, tomatoes, potatoes and peppers as well. The reason this is the solanacae family, both in reality and in name, is because these plants do the bulk of their growing at night.  They absorb energy in daylight hours, then at night use it to grow amazing amounts overnight. Tomatillos are the mashup of the whole solanacae family.  When they are seedlings they have the same fuzzy stem as a tomato, with the leaves of a pepper.  As they grow bigger their pepper-like leaves gain a serrated quality, and the stem all but loses that fuzziness. They grow with the plant structure of a pepper plant and the voraciousness of a tomato when it comes time to flower. The flowers remind me of a cross between a potato flower and an eggplant flower.  The flesh inside the tomatillo is like a cross between a tomato and an eggplant. 

Tomatillo flowers are my favorite flowers in the solanacae family, although all are wonderful. They are the most unique from the others and they're pretty stunning in my opinion.  At the back of the flower is a open tiny green lantern, waiting to grow big once the flower is pollinated. When it gets pollinated, this lantern grows pretty large in size, hollow at first until fruit fills it. 

Above is a picture of a pollinated tomatillo flower.  Like many plants, when the flower gets pollinated, it shrivels up as it's purpose has been served.  The point of flowers is to attract pollinators, who spread the pollen from plant to plant.  Something to remember here is the point of life for all creatures is to grow, reproduce, die.  The time length may vary greatly, and humans and other animals have a lot of other tasks thrown in with those main three.  At the end of the day though, everything is going to try to reproduce eventually, whether they conciously decide to do so or not.

The only other time I've grown tomatillos is in Cleveland, Ohio.  As you can deduce, that's not their preferred climate and I started my tomatillos late.  Through various means I ended up killing all but two which managed to produce.  I was very happy at the time with this small victory, as I knew as long as there were two they would produce.  Even still, they produced tiny fruit both in size and quantity.

 Tomatoes are easy in that they are self pollinators.  This makes it so you only need one plant to produce fruit.  While pollinators are necessary, it is only for the action of shaking the flower around, which can be accomplished by the wind too.  The act of their visit causes the pollen within the flower to find the stamen, triggering the fruit producing response. Tomatillos are different as they require one other plant to be able to produce fruit.  If there's only one, they'll flower like crazy with no fruit. They are different from cannabis and spinach in the fact that there are not distinctly male and female tomatillo plants.  This is because the plant contains all sex organs, it just needs the DNA of another tomatillo plant to be able to produce fruit. 

I started many seeds when I moved into the house on the hill here in Acapulco. Many of these plants were lost in various means, either before or after being planted outside.  Somehow, with all my planting, I ended up with only one tomatillo, which I mistook for a pepper in it's small, non-serrated leafed state.  I planted it outside and within a week it became clear that it wasn't a pepper.  As it started to flower it became clear that my fears were correct, I had one flowering tomatillo plant. It takes between 6-8 weeks for most plants in the solanacae to grow from seed to the point where they start to flower. 

I immediately planted one more tomatillo plant and watched it like a hawk.  That plant is the one photoed above.  It grew to be of a decent size and I put it outside, right next to the older, now extremely sexually frustrated, tomatillo plant.  Within days, there were pollinated flowers all over the thing and lanterns forming.  My first order of business was to get out there and tie up branches to support the coming weight of fruit.  In a short matter of time, every flower on that thing should get pollinated.  As long as nothing bad happens, this plant should produce a crazy amount of fruit.

My absolute favorite feature to tomatillos is their signature lantern.  The lantern grows to a size probably predetermined by the plant.  You can look  up into the lantern to see that there's only a really tiny little fruit forming. The fruit grows in size until it fills that lantern and eventually bursts through it, like the fruits just about everyone has seen in the store.  

I couldn't help but think about the similarities between this tomatillo plant and the many cannabis plants I've cultivated at this point.  The goal in cannabis growing is to sexually frustrate the plant, to cause it to produce as many of its luxurious flowers as it is capable.  Cannabis, like tomatillos, are a plant that require the pollen of another plant to produce viable seed.  When you have a garden of only female plants, with perfect conditions to keep them from wanting to hermaphrodite(that is, produce male parts on a female plant in a last ditch effort to reproduce in stressful conditions), the plants produce flowers increasing in size and smell in an attempt to bring a pollinator.  If the pollinator never comes, this is the cannabis farmers delight as they have many high quality seed free buds.  

In my research and experience as an unschooled botanist, I've learned that cannabis farming isn't all that different from farming many other plants.  It employs many of the same techniques for care and at the end of the day is just a plant like any other. The fact that the United States loves to cage people for something that grows in the dirt is appalling to me, and obviously a huge part of why I left.  While cannabis isn't legal here in Mexico, there's a completely different attitude towards it.  The Supreme Court of Mexico has already declared cannabis use a human right, legalization is not far off here.   No country is perfect but Mexico at least seems to be moving in the right direction.

Rebel the Garden Dog