St. Mary’s Church of England Primary School and the Tomtato®

Children from St. Mary’s Church of England Primary School in Woodbridge grow our famous Tomtato®’s

St. Mary’s Church of England Voluntary Aided Primary School in Woodbridge, Suffolk received a handful of our wonderful Tomtato® plants for free. We did this to encourage and educate the children about growing their own vegetables and the enjoyment this can bring. They lovingly grew their Tomtato®’s and sent us a letter thanking us for the plants which we gave for free, and telling us how they got on. The letter was from three of the class Rebecca, Charlotte and Ettie.

Letter from St Mary's School Woodbridge

Letter from St Mary’s School Woodbridge

They also provided photographs of the plants, from which they had a bumper harvest. All the tomatoes and potatoes were then shared out between the growers and the class, so that each child was able to take some home to their parents and carers. The remainder of the produce was sold to the teachers and staff, who all said the tomatoes and potatoes were scrumptious!

St Mary's and Tomtato® Growing

St Mary’s and Tomtato® Growing

This exercise has hopefully shown the children and parents that growing your own fruit and vegetables is neither difficult nor time consuming. It brings great rewards and shows everyone how to become self sustaining, as we all know that home grown is best.

St Mary and Tomtato® Fully Grown

St Mary’s and Tomtato® Fully Grown

The children seemed to have a lot of fun and lets hope we can encourage more children to grow their own fruit and vegetables.

Thank you St. Mary’s Church of England Voluntary Aided Primary School in Woodbridge for your lovely letter and super photographs.

 

 

 

Egg & Chips® – Another World First in 2-in-1 Cropping

From the creators of the ground breaking Tomtato® comes Egg & Chips®

– another world first in 2-in-1 cropping solutions for the home gardener

egg and chips

  • Aubergines AND potatoes from the same plant!
  • Lovingly hand grafted to bring you bumper crops
  • Great novelty factor for kids and kids at heart
  • Perfect for patio and balcony pots

Following the phenomenal success of the hand-grafted Tomtato® (More than 1million sold worldwide since launch in 2013), Thompson & Morgan plant breeders have carried out extensive grafting trials to create the next step in space-saving, dual-cropping vegetable plants with Egg & Chips®. For the first time ever you can now produce aubergines (better known as egg plants in the US and Europe) and potatoes on the same plant.

Aside from the dual-cropping benefits of Egg & Chips®, the grafting process makes it easier than ever before to grow quality aubergines in the UK climate. The hardy, vigorous potato plant supports the more delicate aubergine far better than its own root system can in British soil, enabling optimum fruit production. You won’t even need a greenhouse to grow Egg & Chips® – a sunny, sheltered spot in the garden will produce great results.

The development of Egg & Chips® was kept tightly under wraps – the seed and plant specialist even moved its annual summer press days off site in 2015 to keep final crop trials a secret.

egg and chips

Thompson & Morgan New Product Development Manager Michael Perry said: “It’s been hard keeping quiet about this amazing plant. I’ve had to bite my tongue for the past year! Egg & Chips® is a real innovation. For seasoned veg growers this is a really novel development. For those without the luxury of an allotment or large vegetable patch it makes the most of available space in the garden. Even the smallest patio or balcony can accommodate a pot-grown Egg & Chips® plant – pair it with a Tomtato® plant and you’ll have three easy to grow crops from just two pots”.

The productive plants offer guaranteed results, making them great fun for kids just getting into growing. For kids at heart the innovation will make a great “show off” plant on the patio this summer. The sturdy potato plant gives the aubergine the vigour and strength to grow strongly and harvest heavily under UK growing conditions. Above ground you will harvest an average of 3 to 4 large tasty aubergines. Below ground, harvest heavy yields of up to 2kg of delicious white potatoes which are incredibly versatile. You can boil them, mash them, roast them or make chips. There’s no genetic modification – it’s an all-natural, and safe process.

Egg & Chips® also dispels the myth that you need to salt, wash and dry aubergines to draw out bitter juices before cooking – a laborious chore that has put many people off growing these Mediterranean plants in the UK. The aubergine variety chosen for the grafting process is a modern strain that has had the bitterness bred out of it – simply pick, chop and cook.

Orders are now being taken for mail order despatch from April onwards. With limited first year stock Thompson & Morgan recommends early ordering.

Buy your Egg & Chips® potted plants here

2-in-1 Cropping Vegetables

Whichever way you look at it, our new vegetable plant creations make sense! Space-saving, double-cropping, fun for kids, easy for beginners, and not to mention tasty and flavoursome…

Let’s look at the story of the dual cropping vegetables!

ketchup and chips

First we launched the TomTato®. Known for many years as a phenomenon within the horticultural world, this novelty has now gone mainstream! In days gone by, allotmenteers actually spent time sellotaping tomato plants onto potato stems in order to create the fabled ‘TomTato®’.

It wasn’t until a few years back that we finally found a way to produce plants on a commercial basis. But, we didn’t do this with just any tomato and potato. On the top, we grafted a super sweet variety, with a Brix content so high it makes it taste as sweet as a strawberry. The fruits are also deliciously thin-skinned, so much so that you’d never find them in supermarkets (as they would not transport as successfully!) The variety is also a bumper cropper! Plants can produce in excess of 300 fruits per plant.

However, don’t forget that below the ground your plants will be creating that surprise harvest; 2-3kg of delicious white potatoes!! A further year’s development has also meant we’ve been able to select an even heavier cropping potato for the base, now giving 50% more ‘tatties’ than the first incarnation of the TomTato®!

When we released the TomTato® to the public, it took the world by storm – more than 1million plants have sold worldwide since 2013. The plant resonated with such a wide range of people too, and not all of them were necessarily gardeners or plant-lovers! Even teenagers were tweeting about this exciting plant, which some nicknamed ‘frankenfood’. Of course, this was inaccurate, as it’s just 2 plants fixed, pegged, grafted together, so everything is 100% natural!

egg-and-chips-image2

With our grafting projects, the next obvious step seemed to be to choose another compatible duo, and we’ve been playing with a few ideas over the last few years. And we are now ready to reveal Egg & Chips® to the world…! If this sounds utterly crazy, don’t worry we’re not talking chicken eggs! Our latest dual cropping plant pairs an aubergine (better known in the US and Europe as the Egg Plant) and potatoes. The potato base grafting actually gives the Aubergine an extra vigour boost, meaning Egg & CHIPS will produce better aubergines in the UK than a traditional aubergine plant can.

So, as well as ketchup and chips or Patatas Bravas from our Tomtato plants, you now have the components to make a really tasty aubergine and potato gratin all from one plant!

Grow your TomTato® and Egg & Chips® in patio containers, growbags (turned up on end!), on the allotment or on the veg patch. Be part of the dual cropping revolution, order your plants today, we expect them to sell out quickly!

Ketchup and Chips

No, your eyes do not deceive you! This is a plant which produces tomatoes AND potatoes. That’s a whole meal in one; ketchup AND chips!

ketchup and chips

Once thought of only as a horticultural phenomenon, the TomTato® is now a reality. Despite reports of ‘Frankenstein food’, the TomTato® is 100% natural and is created by grafting, a natural process which has been carried out on plants for many years.

Experts in the Netherlands take a baby potato plant and slice the top off it; they then do the same to a baby tomato plant, and finally clip the 2 together. Compatibility (both are members of the Solanaceae family) means that those 2 plants then grow together as one!

ketchup and chipsIt took many years to get the TomTato® project just right though! We had to consider many things. Firstly, we needed an early tomato and a later cropping potato, as you don’t want to lift your potatoes and ruin your ripening tomato crop! Next, we had to make sure we chose just the right varieties; we needed a strong stemmed potato, which could take the weight of that bumper tomato fruit crop above! Plus, of course, we had to consider flavour- the tomato on the top of the ‘Ketchup and Chips’ plant is super sweet, with an exceptionally high brix content (measure of sweetness in fruit and veg), and a tangy flavour. It is remarkably high cropping too, 100’s of fruits per plant. The potatoes on the bottom are just as delicious; and can be boiled, mashed or roasted!

We launched the TomTato® to much fanfare in 2013, and twitter and facebook went mad for this crazy new food crop! Young and old were fascinated by this plant, which wasn’t just a novelty, but was space-saving, productive and exciting to grow!

Secure your TomTato® plants now for delivery next Spring. Hurry whist stocks last!

TomTato®

We were extremely happy to be selected as a TomTato® trialler for Thompson & Morgan. To grow an innovative and inspiring plant is such a great opportunity and I am here to share the journey with you. When our TomTato® arrived safe and sound I was incredibly excited to begin the growing process. The plant was packaged extremely well for transit and did not suffer from the journey at all. By the following morning he had straightened up and was reaching out for the sunshine.

TomTato

There was a squash in the cardboard outer at the top from rough handling in transit, but this had no ill effect at all and the container inside was fine. We were quite surprised to see how big the plant was, we were expecting something tiny! A good drink and he immediately flourished, bright green and desperate to grow!

TomTato

We have planted him in a large tub in an outdoor plastic tent style greenhouse. He looks really healthy and has shot up, and about a week ago we were rewarded with the first flower sprigs appearing. They are now revealing yellow and will be fully fledged flowers very soon. The whole family are following his progress very closely, particularly as my daughter is now starting a growing project at school and having to keep a diary for a sunflower – well homework has got a lot more exciting lately! We will be introducing the class to TomTato® in the coming week or so.
The plant has a great following, particularly at work where I am asked several times a day for progress reports. I have also spoken about him on our international company staff website, where we are holding a gardening forum as part of stress management and relaxing with nature project. Everyone is enthusiastic and amazed, and there is a great interest to see the end results as well as the growing process.

TomTato

I am keeping a detailed record of everything as we go along, and we are truly thrilled with this amazing plant and thank you for this opportunity to grow with you. No problems at all so far, he is a fantastic high quality plant, really healthy and eager to grow and we are very excited to see his progress!

TomTato

 

Wendy Morley

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