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?