Co-Authored By:
Asked by: Annalisa Molis
food and drink world cuisinesWhat are the balls on potato plants?
Last Updated: 5th February, 2020
Those round seed pods are also called potato fruit, potato berries and seed balls. They look like green cherry tomatoes and usually appear in small clusters. The interior of a seed pod has up to 500 tiny seeds distributed throughout a mass of moist tissue.
Click to see full answer.
Similarly, it is asked, what are the tomato like fruits on potato plants?
After flowering, potato plants produce small green fruits that resemble green cherry tomatoes, each containing about 300 seeds. Like all other parts of the plant except the tubers, the fruit contain the toxic alkaloid solanine and are therefore unsuitable for consumption.
Subsequently, question is, why do my potato plants have berries? The fruits may look a lot like a tomato but are just the berry of the potato plant. The berries are not edible but they don't affect the development of the tubers. That said, nightshade plants have high levels of a toxin called solanine.
Similarly one may ask, is the fruit of a potato plant edible?
Potato flowers and fruit are produced because this is how the plants multiply themselves, by seed. These potato fruit are not edible. More precisely, they are poisonous. They contain high amounts of solanine that can make the eater very ill.
Why do my potato plants have tomatoes growing on them?
Occasionally gardeners are surprised to find small, round, green, tomato-like fruit on their potato plants. These fruit are not the result of cross-pollination with tomatoes. Potato fruit, as well as the plant itself, contain relatively large amounts of solanine. Solanine is a poisonous alkaloid.