A new purple leafed plant...Tomato??

You know how we hortie types tend to get all excited about plants with leaves of an unusual color? We’re especially smitten when leaves are purplish or black. Well, hold onto your hort hats, horties, because I’ve got a new one! The leaves are a gorgeous dark, dark purple, bordering on black. And they’ve got a lovely texture with a prominently quilted surface that further accentuates that inky color when the sun bounces off the leaf. Sounds like a plant nerd’s dream, doesn’t it?

Not quite. It’s a tomato plant. Several tomato plants, in fact. These are plants I started from seed back before the winter turned, well, wintry. I’d started sowing seeds late and someone had gifted me with larger plants, so those went into the garden once it cooled down enough to grow things this fall. My plan was for these late seedlings to be a second planting, or possibly back-up plants in case a freeze killed my garden tomatoes. I’ve dutifully toted them in and out of the garage with every freeze and they’re still alive, although now they’re horribly pot-bound and are exhibiting an assortment of symptoms that would make for an excellent essay question on a plant pathology exam. My garden tomatoes are also still alive, thanks to my fabulous Tomato Protection Contraption, so these poor little plants sit patiently on the bench in my backyard nursery, awaiting their fate and doing their best to photosynthesize. I suppose the humane thing would be to go ahead and put them on the compost pile.

This ain't what a termater
is spozed to look like.

But it’s interesting to observe so I’ve kept them around…in the interest of science, of course (nothing to do with laziness). I’ve been watching the purplish cast creep into the foliage all winter. I’ve got three different tomato varieties on the bench and only the ‘Sapho’ are turning purple. And every plant of that variety is purple. Apparently 'Sapho' is more sensitive to P deficiency—purplish foliage is a symptom. Which is kind of ironic, since P deficiency is rare in FL, because our soils are typically very high in this nutrient. But in this case, it makes perfect sense because (a) these seedlings are in grow mix, not soil; and (b) plants have a harder time extracting the P they need from cold soils. Ain’t science fascinating?

I Love Calendula

There is a happy orange glow emanating from my vegetable garden on this gray and dreary January morning. The veggie garden has largely been a disappointment this year. I’ve been blaming it on weather, which has been uncharacteristically cold and gray for Central Florida. But regardless of its effects on the tomatoes and basil, one plant has declared itself immune to winter’s curse: Calendula officinalis, aka, pot marigold.

Back in my days at the UT Trial Garden, we used to plant it every year, and every year it would get torched by Botrytis fungus by mid-summer. Obviously it wasn’t happy with the humidity of a southern summer. I tried it again as a winter annual in the trial garden at the place in South Florida where I worked. At its peak it was mediocre. I guess I tried it again this year more out of habit than anything else—and because someone gave me a few plants–and I finally get it! Take a look at these babies and see if you can resist smiling.

How can you not love those happy flowers? Dontcha just want to draw smiley faces on them all? Anyway, according to cultivation information that’s out there, they aren’t frost hardy, although I haven’t covered mine during our cold snaps and they’ve done beautifully. I suspect they must be able to withstand a light frost but maybe not a full-blown freeze. Past experience (and “the literature”) says they don’t like excessive heat and humidity, so we deep-southerners must grow them in the winter, as we do with pansies, dianthus, snapdragons and petunias.

I’ve always heard that the petals are edible and are sometimes added to soups and salads for color effect, although I’ve never actually tried it, not having had a lot of actual flowers bloom before the plants croaked. It’s also said that they are used in various medicinal concoctions and to make fabric dyes, which gets my Mother Nature/science geek gene all excited. Part of me wants to clear out the entire back yard and scatter zillions of calendula seeds so I can harvest the flowers, boil them down and see what happens when I soak old sheets and t-shirts in the resulting liquid…for varying intervals…and with different mordants…this could become a big project. OK, maybe next year. For now I’ll just force myself to enjoy the flowers on the plants I have.