Tomatoes have been eaten since ancient times, enjoy a range of interesting information and cool trivia related to this popular food.Tomatoes are easy to grow and are becoming a more and more popular crop. A couple of tomato plants will produce hundreds of fruit and keep you in fresh tomatoes from mid Summer right through to early Autumn. Since now is the time to start sowing your tomato seeds we have compiled our top 10 list of interesting facts about this prolific plant to stoke up your interest.

• Tomatoes originally came from Peru, where their Aztec name translated to plump thing with a navel.
• The scientific name for tomato is Lycopersicon lycopersicum meaning wolf peach.
•  People used to be afraid to eat tomatoes, thinking them poisonous due to their relation to the belladonna or (deadly nightshade) plant.
• Tomatoes increase in weight as they ripen, even after harvesting.
• Tomatoes are the richest source of lycopene which is important for the health of the prostate gland in men.
• They were first brought to Europe in the mid 1500’s.
• The first tomatoes in Europe were yellow varieties, the Italian for tomato is pomodoro and translates to golden apple.
• A tomato is a fruit. The confusion arose after the 1890s when the US supreme court named them a vegetable for taxation purposes. A fruit is the edible part of the plant containing seeds, a vegetable is stem, leaf or root.
• There is no mention of tomatoes in either the bible or in the complete works of shakespeare.
• Tomato seedlings have been grown in space.
• There are over 10,000 varieties of tomato, these come in a variety of colours including pink, purple, black, yellow and white.