Comment by firesteelrain 14 hours ago
This isn’t true. You can grow - it’s just the seasons are different or offset. In the warmer climates you actually have a longer growing season than say New England. Your local extension office can explain.
For example, here is the UFIFAS which is very good
https://sfyl.ifas.ufl.edu/media/sfylifasufledu/orange/hort-r...
> author is not talking about vegetables
He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
He does have one paragraph about tomatoes, but he also talks about Andean cacti like Browningia candelaris, "plants from places like cloud forests of Central America", Solanum pennellii, and "plants from (...) the Páramo of Ecuador".
My mother was able to grow tomatoes successfully in Pohnpei, which is at 3° latitude and never gets outside the temperature range of about 23°–32°. https://weather.com/es-GT/tiempo/10dias/l/cc8849a0250ec854cb.... They were pretty leggy though; she had a hard time keeping them alive.
> He's talking about growing tomatoes all the way through the article. Nothing but talking about how tomatoes grow
This is flat-out wrong. (And the comment you replied to is also wrong.)
He mentions tomatoes only 6 times in about 1500 words. These words appear half-way into the article, in only 2 of the roughly 16 paragraphs. Three of those instances are in direct reference or comparison to the wild ancestors of tomatoes.
While not specifying, the article also mentions high-altitude, tropical plants and cacti.
I think you're overstating his point.
While you can grow them in, lets say, Houston, they're not easy to grow. They get infections at the drop of a hat, and if you so much as turn around, some sort of insect will munch through them. They don't yield much fruit, and the fruits they do yield generally leave something to be desired in the flavor department.
This is his point. The plants don't have much energy to fend off infections or predators, and they don't have much less energy to put into their fruit.
If you put a tomato plant in a more suitable climate, the things are nearly weeds. You put them in a bucket, make sure they get enough water, and you a few months later you have sweet, juicy, flavorful fruit with basically zero effort.
While we've bred cultivars that can be grown in places like Houston or Florida, the plants don't particularly like it.