Category: Vegetables

The FreshPlaza piece on the kumato is not very long. But it does manage to squeeze in a lot of interesting information. The kumato is a tomato that ripens from green to dark brown. It is the result of a conventional breeding programme which involved a wild species. And it is just coming up to its first harvest in Australia. This definitely deserved more investigation.

There’s no doubt it looks pretty extraordinary. But the most intriguing thing about the kumato is that the wild species involved in its development may be from the Galapagos.

Now, Lycopersicon cheesmaniae from the Galapagos Islands has been used to breed dark orange tomatoes before, though it does not have a dark brown skin like the kumato. ((This species was actually published as L. cheesmanii, after Evelyn Cheesman, but that was incorrect, as the Latinists among us will know, as Ms Cheesman was a woman and the specific epithet therefore requires a feminine ending.)) Check out this excerpt from an article celebrating the late great tomato geneticist and explorer Prof. Charles M. Rick in 1997, five years before his death:

Rick’s research led him on 15 genetic scavenger hunts to Andean South America, the homeland of the tomato, where he hunted for wild tomato varieties carrying useful genes. Among his discoveries were wild tomatoes growing near the tidelands of the Galapagos Islands, despite salty sprays that would have stunted or killed a domestic tomato plant.

Or again:

An excellent lecturer, Rick was much sought after by universities who valued both his rigorous science and his humor and flair for storytelling. A perennial favorite involved his frustrations in trying to germinate wild tomato seeds collected from the Galapagos Islands. The emerging mystery of how the plants reproduce in the wild was only resolved after the seeds were “processed” by passing through the digestive track of a Galapagos tortoise, resulting in vigorous seedlings.

The kumato should actually be the Kumato©. It was bred by Syngenta, and first released in the UK in about 2004, I think. But the Roguelands Heirloom Vegetable Seeds Company also has 40 different dark brown to black-skinned varieties in its collection, and says black tomato varieties first appeared in the 19th century in Ukraine.