I have these two plants growing in my garden, and I thought they were eggplant. they had small, purple fruits, but the fruits never seemed to get bigger. I got online and searched for eggplant varieties: nothing looked similar. So I thought maybe it was a tomato: again, no match. It didn’t look like any sort of tomatillo or ground cherry that I might have planted, either. Yet the leaves looked somwhat like a tomato…
At this point I began to get concerned. What the heck was growing in my garden? I called an avid gardening friend, who suggested perhaps it was a tree tomato, or tamarillo. I looked at the pictures and decided it wasn’t that either. But in the course of my research, I ran across a familar name: garden huckleberry. I searched for that, and found this information:
The Garden Huckleberry (Solanum nigrum var. melanocerasum) is probably not what one would necessarily add when making up their seed lists for the garden. Often it may come with your seed order as a free gift along with Vine Peach (Cucumis melo) or some other oddity that would normally sit on the shelf of a seed retailer for almost ever.
And indeed that is exactly what happened: a seed retailer threw in two free gifts, garden huckleberry and vine peach (which is a variety of cantelope). I planted them both, and completely forgot about the garden huckleberries.
The garden huckleberry is not a berry at all, but a nightshade, a distant relative of the tomato. The green fruits are poisonous, but the purple fruits are edible. They’re a bit bland, and require lemon juice to perk them up, but for those of us living in “fruit tree challenged” soil, it’s a forgiving annual plant that lets us harvest at leasta little of our own fruit.
I found recipes online for pies and preserves, but haven’t tried them yet…
