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Project Noah Nature School
Solanum lycopersicum
This is one of the tomato plants in our garden. It is growing very tall and has a lot of yellow flowers and some small green tomatoes.
The plant is in the school garden and gets a lot of sunlight.
This plant was chosen by a 5th-grade group at John G (The Red Dragonflies). Here are their questions based on their observations: 1. Does it matter how big the tomatoes get even when they turn red? 2. What do pollinators do when there are no more flowers on the plant? 2. Why are the flowers yellow but the tomatoes green?
Spotted on Jul 8, 2021
Submitted on Jul 9, 2021
3 Comments
Aphids eat the leaves and will cause the leaves of the plant to turn yellow
Spider mites feed on the plant’s leaves and kill the plant by making sticky webs on the leaves that keep the leaves from being able to take in food (photosynthesis).
Tomato worms and stinkbugs leave tiny brown spots on the tomato after eating from it.
Slugs dig holes in tomatoes and eat what is inside.
What insects did you see on these plants? Were they "beneficial" insects or "harmful" insects?
What do you think pollinators do if there are no more flowers on the plant? Pollinators are clever! They go from plant to plant looking for their food supplies and take them back to the nest. If one plant doesn't have something good, they move on. what is one way to measure the "food value" of a plant? Could you design an experiment where you measure the number of times pollinators visit the plant? Do you think this changes over a season?
Bigger tomatoes means more for you to eat, but sometimes bigger isn't better. Tomatoes are the fruit of the tomato plant, and fruit gets its flavor from the vitamins, minerals, salts, and compounds produced by the plant, but the larger the fruit, the more of those compounds are needed to make the flavor, so a tiny red cherry tomato is probably going to have a lot more flavor than a big, fat, red tomato.
And what happens to the plant if the fruit gets too heavy? Can it break the plant?