Tomato Health Benefits

Red or yellow luscious tomatoes, eaten raw or cooked for centuries have a high nutritive value. To know about some tomato health benefits, scroll down.

Native to South America, tomatoes belong to the nightshade family and grow on sprawling plants (vines). It the most cultivated plant world over for its fruit; a vegetable to us. Presently there are about a thousand cultivars that suit different growing conditions. Tomato sizes can vary from a 5mm to a 6cm in diameter. They come in varied colors too, to enliven a platter; yellow, red, orange, green, and some ornamental colors of black, white pink, purple with patterns and all. Of all these, its mostly the red, yellow, green and orange ones most consumed. Unlike other fruits, tomatoes are slightly bitter and acidic in taste that gets tempered during cooking. They are not used in food preparation for their taste, flavor and color alone, but for the enormous amount of tomato health benefits.

Tomato Gardening - Know These Secrets to Choose Healthy Nursery Plants

Millions of people each year flock to the nursery in an effort to jump start their tomato growing season. That's because we know that 'growing our own' produces much juicier, tastier, tomatoes than the baseball-shaped shipping-crate tomatoes at our local market.

Nursery plants are started from seed under controlled greenhouse conditions and sold by the grower when they reach a certain size. Prestarted plants are a quicker and simpler alternative to starting your own tomatoes from seed, as this can be the most demanding part of the growing process.

Consider These Facts When Choosing Healthy Plants

Tomato Fertilizer

How do you prepare a tomato fertilizer at home with simplicity? Read the article and find out the ingredients required for preparing tomato fertilizers at home.

It's that a great view the pulpy red tomatoes growing all over your garden. Cultivating tomatoes at home is pretty easy. You will have to furrow the soil and then plant the seeds. A tomato fertilizer is also easy to prepare at home. However, you should know the different varieties of tomato plants before spraying fertilizers over the seeds. They are classified as globe, beefsteak, oxheart, plums, pear, cherry, grapes and campari tomatoes. A tomato fertilizer is either organic or chemical based. In this article you shall come to know the different type of organic tomato fertilizers essential for healthy growth of a tomato plant.

Tomato Blight Treatment

Tomato blight treatment consists of getting rid of the diseased parts of the plant, and… to know more, read the article below.

One of the greatest woes or dread of every gardener is blight, a fungal infection that occurs in two forms; late blight and early blight. The first one is caused by the Phytophthora infestans, and the other one, by what is known as Alternaria solani. These organisms are also known to jeopardize other plants such as potatoes (causing potato blight) and members of the family Solanaceae. Out of these two, late blight is known to be the most severe; it was responsible for causing the European, Irish and Highland potato famines in the 1840's. Blight can easily spread from plant to plant, eventually infecting the entire colony. One of the important steps in tomato blight treatment is to identify the symptoms at the earliest. Most people fail to do so, and by the time they realize that their plants have been attacked by a blight infestation, a significant damage is already caused. The lower leaves of the plants are the ones that must be watched out for. The disease causes black or brown circles on them. These circles usually have a darker outer ring, with a light shaded center. With time, as the infections spread, more and more leaves develop these circles, eventually turning to yellow, and the entire plant is destroyed.

Tomato - Fruit or Vegetable

Is tomato a fruit or vegetable? The answer to this question is not straight. Tomato can be both, a fruit or a vegetable, depending upon your perspective. Read on to know more..

The confusion if tomato is a fruit or a vegetable, is as old as tomato itself. Although, science has already answered this question, common people still fumble when it comes to deciding, if tomato is a fruit or vegetable.

Tomato Fruit or Vegetable - Botanical Perspective

Botanical science defines fruits, as ripened ovaries of the flowering plants. Thus, fruits are the dissemination of seeds in flowering plants. Going by this definition, tomato is definitely a fruit. But that would also mean that peas, eggplants, pumpkins, capsicum, cucumber etc. are fruits! Seeds are the part of a plant that make a fruit a 'fruit' and vegetable a 'vegetable'. The term 'vegetable' does not exist in botany. Hence according to scientists, all the seed producing flowering plants produce fruits and not vegetables.

5 Crazy Things People Used to Believe About Childbirth and Babymaking

We've come a long way gals! Take pregnancy and childbirth, for instance. You won't believe some of the oddball things women used to believe and practice, according to a new book. Let's just say, I'm pretty glad to be living in the year 2010!

I'm fascinated with the new book Get Me Out: A History of Childbirth from the Garden of Eden to the Sperm Bank by Randi Hutter Epstein, a doctor and mother of four children. She was interviewed recently on the New York Times health blog, Well. Here are a few things people used to believe about pregnancy and childbirth in the past:

1. Good sex = healthier babies. "They ... believed good sex made for good babies, so those old books were about how to have simultaneous orgasms," she says.

Tomatillos – The Essential Ingredient in Green Salsa

You love salsa and chips. You find that you’re eating more and more Mexican food, but are you familiar with tomatillos and salsa verde, or green salsa? Why not find out what you’ve been missing.

By Earl Hunsinger

You’ve probably seen them in the produce section of your local grocery store and wondered what they were. Usually the ones available in the grocery store look like small green tomatoes with lantern shaped paper husks around them. At the same time, because the name sounds similar, when asked if they have tomatillos, some that are unfamiliar with them may confuse them with tommy toe tomatoes, which is a variety of cherry tomatoes. While they are related to tomatoes, tomatillos are a different fruit altogether. To make it even more confusing, in most of Mexico they are known as tomate verde, or green tomato. Even the name tomatillo, which is used in northern Mexico and the US, can be translated as little tomato.