Ok so I’m working through the microbes course. It really has me thinking about tomatoes and my local wild Solanum species. Which honestly have been my arch nemesis because they are such a pain and just everywhere.
So what if they could actually help me with the tomatoes?
The idea with the corn medicine is to give the corn seed a bath in local grass root soup. Inoculating them with the goodies that the local grass has and they will need to grow there.
I have wild Solanums…
Wonderberry…? Black nightshade…? Solanum americanum…? I’m not sure yet. It’s a solanum with little black berries.
Horse nettle… Solanum carolinense. A thorny S.O.B. that I’m constantly trying to convince not to grow in my pastures. Though these all are all over the farm.
None of them are close enough to cross with potatoes or tomatoes it seems. But they are plentiful here… unfortunately… But maybe I could use them to inoculate the tomatoes I’m growing? It would give me some more gumption to pull more of them in the pasture…
Likely black solanum or european black nightshade, which is also related to wonderberry and otherwise known as schwarzenbeeren. More distantly related to garden huckleberry.
If the flowers are white, you’re fine to eat the berries. If it has purple, red, blue, or pink flowers it’s probably a poisonous relative. Red berries are a problem as well. That’s bitter nightshade.
I use the berries with currants as a blueberry substitute for baking. Also, if you’re harvesting the berries there will be fewer seeds for next spring.
I found myself in a tricky position with an unknown nightshade last year. It had white flowers and little black berries. I didn’t plant it. It just showed up. I really wanted it to be an edible black nightshade, but I couldn’t be sure it was one.
I tried identifying it with a plant identifier, and it came up as hoe nightshade, a weed that had conflicting information about whether or not it was edible. I checked wonderberry and black nightshade pictures carefully, and what I had seemed to fit hoe nightshade better than those, so it was probably right.
I couldn’t tell if it was edible or a poisonous relative. If it was edible, I really wanted to try it. If it was poisonous, I really didn’t want to.
Finally, I decided to just pull up the plant and all of the berries and destroy them. The risk was too high that it was a poisonous plant.
I might have tasted a berry or two to test it under other circumstances, if all I was risking was a stomachache, but since I was breastfeeding an infant . . . I really couldn’t justify taking any risks at all that might affect him.
I still regret that I couldn’t be 100% certain one way or the other, though. If it was an edible berry, I really would’ve liked to have tried it.
Black nightshade is really an acquired taste, although I see them as garden candy. It was one of the edibles that came back every year once I planted it the first time.
The hoe nightshade is an introduced species from South America. Solanum nigrum is an introduced species from Europe. If you want seeds I can send some.
Sure! It would be interesting to try, and if I got the seeds from a fellow gardener who eats them, I know it won’t be a plant that’s potentially poisonous. (Laugh.)
One time, I was eating black nightshade berries a few at a time during the summer. No problem. Then during the fall frost harvest, I ate about 1/2 cup of them. 6 hours later, I had a terrible stomach ache. So I got up and researched what I had really eaten. Found out that there was no cure, either I would survive or die. So I took a marker, and wrote the name of the species on my chest, followed by “oops”. Then I went back to sleep.
Hard to explain the taste. They don’t taste like you would expect fruit to taste, which is a shock the first time. A hint of sweet, a hint of tomato, but mostly they have their own flavor. Most of the people I have conned into trying them either love them or hate them.
Eat them when they are fully ripe and all black.
To address Joseph’s point, all solanums are potentially poisonous, but like tomatoes these have been cultivated for a very long time.
I have those pesky horse nettles too, and when I took the endophyte course, I also thought about using them to inoculate the tomatoes. But the timing was all wrong - the horse nettles were nowhere to be found when it was time to plant the tomato seeds. Not sure how to get around this…
Ya that’s what I was thinking about. I was thinking maybe if I can’t get them during seed starting I could still try doing it later and watering a couple plants with it.
