Tomatoes belong to the Solanaceae, or nightshade family, as do peppers, tomatillos, eggplants, potatoes and others. Some Solanaceae are not very nice.
Many years ago when I was ordering some bare-root crepe myrtles from a seed catalog I received a free bonus of "garden blueberry" seeds, an annual claimed to look and taste just like blueberries. They don't. They taste awful--not much different from eating the leaves and stems of a pepper plant. The idea is to cook them up with loads of sugar and use them for pie fillings and such. I never tried them again after tasting one raw. Later in the summer I recognized what could be a real problem. Other than the size of the berries, garden blueberries look very much like belladonna, commonly called "deadly nightshade."
Deadly nightshade is a very common weed that readily grows in bare soil where other plants won't grow. It also likes disturbed soil, such as newly tilled gardens. It could be very easy to mistake the deadly version for the same plant you grew from seed the year before. The leaves are very similar and the berries ripen to the same deep purple-blue color.
Deadly nightshade comes up voluntarily in my garden and along the fence of our backyard. I leave it because it makes a good trap plant. Flea beetles like it better than anything else in my garden.
Many years ago when I was ordering some bare-root crepe myrtles from a seed catalog I received a free bonus of "garden blueberry" seeds, an annual claimed to look and taste just like blueberries. They don't. They taste awful--not much different from eating the leaves and stems of a pepper plant. The idea is to cook them up with loads of sugar and use them for pie fillings and such. I never tried them again after tasting one raw. Later in the summer I recognized what could be a real problem. Other than the size of the berries, garden blueberries look very much like belladonna, commonly called "deadly nightshade."
Deadly nightshade is a very common weed that readily grows in bare soil where other plants won't grow. It also likes disturbed soil, such as newly tilled gardens. It could be very easy to mistake the deadly version for the same plant you grew from seed the year before. The leaves are very similar and the berries ripen to the same deep purple-blue color.
Deadly nightshade comes up voluntarily in my garden and along the fence of our backyard. I leave it because it makes a good trap plant. Flea beetles like it better than anything else in my garden.
The ripe berries are pretty and tempting, another reason foragers need to know their stuff. I was warned by my grandmother about deadly nightshade as soon as I could walk. Kids who live in the country encounter poison plants all the time, but belladonna popped up in our suburban back yard every summer as well.
My camera wanted to focus on one of the leaves, so it's hard to tell, but there is a green berry on the left in the foreground.
Belladonna has been used by doctors medicinally and in much of the Twentieth Century, belladonna cigarettes were available in drugstores without a prescription as a remedy for asthma.
Deadly nightshade is extremely toxic so growing something as similar as garden blueberries requires extreme caution. Another nightshade, ground cherries, makes a much better choice as a forage fruit, tastes great and can flourish when transplanted to the garden. Plus, the only thing I know of that ground cherries could be mistaken for is tomatillos. I will write more about ground cherries in a future post on foraging.
Stephen
All photos are copyright 2017, Stephen P. Scott
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