Tomatoes in Farmstead World — crop in the game, and what it is on a real farm.
The tomato is a nightshade fruit native to South America, grown as a trailing vine and eaten as a vegetable.
It comes in hundreds of shapes and colours, from tiny cherries to heavy beefsteaks, and it drinks a great deal of water to set fruit.
Farm facts about tomatoes
Botanically the tomato is a fruit - a berry - but in 1893 the US Supreme Court ruled it a vegetable, because it is served with dinner and not dessert. (en.wikipedia.org)
The tomato took its name from the Nahuatl word 'tomatl', and it was already being cultivated in southern Mexico by 500 BCE. (en.wikipedia.org)
A 16th-century account of an Aztec market lists 'large tomatoes, small tomatoes, sweet tomatoes, large serpent tomatoes' in colors from bright red to deep yellow. (en.wikipedia.org)
Tomatoes reached Europe soon after Cortes captured Tenochtitlan in 1521; Italy's first writer on them thought they were a new kind of eggplant, later called 'golden apples'. (en.wikipedia.org)
Early Europeans grew tomatoes as decoration and feared eating them because of their poisonous nightshade cousins - John Gerard's influential 1597 Herbal called them poisonous. (en.wikipedia.org)
The tomato was once called the 'love apple' - possibly a French misreading of the Italian 'pomo dei Mori' (the Moors' apple) as 'pomme d'amour'. (en.wikipedia.org)