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--- garden:about:plants:groundcherry [2016/09/17 23:17] – created davidbac
+++ garden:about:plants:groundcherry [2016/09/18 00:06] (current) – davidbac
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
+===== Ground Cherry =====
+These sounded like a fun addition to the garden. As described by the seller, Adaptive Seeds:
+<note>"These are one of our favorite things to snack on while walking through the garden. Little, golden husked fruits look like tiny tomatillos but have a deliciously fruity tropical flavor.... We simply wait for them to fall off the plant when we’re sure they are ripe and eat them."</note>
+{{ :garden:about:plants:groundcherry:img_2507.jpg?300|Like ground-hugging tomatillo plants}}They do look like tiny tomatillos and the plants have a similar nature, except that they grow close to the ground. It's about their "falling off the plant" that made me wonder. The plants spread out so when a golden husked fruit falls off the plant, it isn't visible. The sad part is that picking a fallen fruit didn't guarantee the "deliciously fruity tropical flavor." The majority of those on the ground were sour (a random sample indicated 7 of 10). But, yes, there were the rare, delicious ground cherries. And telling them apart before biting in doesn't work well. The only truth is that the ones with the green husk are definitely sour. For the ones with tan husks it's a crap shoot.
+{{:garden:about:plants:groundcherry:img_2511.jpg?300 |Fallen fruit - mostly sour}}The real joke is when the time comes to pull the plants there are hundreds of these fruits, according to their name, lying snugly on the soil. Seeing that some were green and some were tan, I calculated the very slim odds of finding that delicious tropical flavor.
+So, to the compost pile with them all. And that's the other part of the joke. These cherries don't rake up easily - each is less than 3/4's of an inch across. The cleanup after shoveling them up was as time-consuming as the entire process, and picking them up by hand added insult to injury as far as my timing went.
+These aren't on next season's seed order, but no doubt I'll see lots of plants in the spring. Plenty of them were left to, I suspect, spawn more plants next season.