hello. it looks to me like it's an elephant ear plant (Colocasia). http://www.wikihow.com/Grow-Elephant-Ear-Plants instructions how to grow it. or... a yam plant / taro ??? could be. as in your pic, i see the leaf has a blueish hue. Calin

MsFuzz, I only saved seed from my grandmother's tomato at first, and for many years. Large Red Cherry must have been in my garden for 10 years before I realized that it was an heirloom and I could save seed. In fact, it was the great Ben Quisenberry who saved LRC, I guess. He is the same person we have to thank for the Brandywine. There may not be a whole, heckuva lot of open-pollinated varieties I can grow. I almost need those thrive-on-abuse, lightening-quick hybrids but . . . not really. I don't think I've got a cross-bred EG. I don't think it is a mutant. I think (not sure) that I've got EG's mother. If the worker didn't remove the stamens from a flower on a plant that he/she was pollinating for a hybrid, that flower would probably self-pollinate. That's what tomatoes do. So, all the genetic material in the seeds from the fruit of that flower would be from the mother plant. How would they know that one of the fruits didn't have hybrid seeds inside? If the mother was a hybrid, I may be outta-luck using the mystery plant's seed but, I looked at information on tomato hybridizing (linked below). They say that, "Both parents should be pure, preferably being selfpollinated for more than six generations . . ." So, it sounds as tho' this should just be a normal non-hybrid plant. If there is something special about it, the earliness of fruit development might be it. I know that it ain't got no resistance to flea beetles!! (Now watch the plant patent police show up in my garden to seize the mystery plant! If I fall silent about this subject, you know that a judge has issued a gag order . . ! ;o) Steve it would probably take a gag order to shut me up about most anything . . . Here is a link that might be useful: AVRDC - The World Vegetable Center, 8 page pdf

Could you find out about the blight resistence? Or the flavor? Don't care about the size. ****** I'm sorry Donna but I can't. No doubt it's blight tolerance to the common foliage diseases , but which ones I don't know. And I'm sure he doesn't keep track of that for all the varieties he grows each season and since foliage diseases are so common to almost all varieties, hybrid or OP, if I were you I wouldn't assume that Potato Leaf is more or less tolerant than any other variety. If you really want to know you could e-mail Glenn but I can also share with you that this is a very busy time of year and you can't be sure how quickly you'll get an answer. He does have a day job, you know, teaching, which leaves little time to take care of all his heirloom poultry, work on seeds, etc,. ( smile) And flavor? Only a couple of folks each year have listed it in the SSE YEarbooks and there are a few comments about taste being good. But Glenn and I have had long talks about indicating taste in a tomato blurb and with few exceptions he doesn't want to do it b'c he knows that taste of a variety can differ a lot amongst those who grow it and taste it and that taste itself has many variables in terms of how someone grows their tomatoes, what the weather is in any given season, what amendments some use, etc. In his SSE Yearbook listing for this variety Glenn doesn't comment about taste either. Carolyn

"... but now you say that you think environmental conditions might be at work with a few other of your varieties?" [Carolyn] Carolyn, sorry but I seem to be confusing the issue somewhat I know. When I made the original post, no, I didn't think it was environmental because I hadn't seen that with the other tomatoes at all. Maybe I was hasty and maybe I'm not explaining myself just right. Then I re-checked all the tomatoes and found one Merced plant with some elongated globes way down low in the first two sets. Still all the other tomatoes look typical to their known shapes. Now with that particular Merced plant, I bought two in Austin in March and left them on my daughter's patio for a few days while it was cool and rainy. They had blossoms on them. Then I carried them back to Indiana in the trunk of the car and broke one in half while loading luggage. I re-rooted the stem and planted it out with blossoms on it. The first two sets have some elongated fruit. The other Merced is normal in all respects as far as I know them to be. So, yes, I still think something is screwy with this Chapman as ever single one of its 9 small tomatoes are heart shaped ... and that's streched out over maybe 24 inches vertically along the plant and in four different fruit sets. But I guess it could be sensitive to environmental conditions which in this case are unusually warm and dry for this time of the year ... but at the same time cool at night. However, the plant is very healthy and loading up with tomatoes quite well. So, the question would be ... is Chapman noted for elongating fruit due to sensitivity to hot days, cool nights, dry conditions? Is anyone else getting this from Chapman?