Grow America's Favorite Food With New 'Ketchup 'n' Fries' Hybrid Plant
This may be the most American plant ever.
— -- This may be the most American plant ever.
The hybrid plant, cutely dubbed “Ketchup ‘n’ Fries,” was grafted to grow tomatoes on the top portion and potatoes on the bottom. Get it?
“We were really excited because people have been grafting these together for a while, but they were more of a novelty and didn't produce well,” Territorial Seed Company marketing director Tim Russell told ABC News. “But these will actually produce a decent amount of fruit off of the plant. They’re very cool.”
Sold now for the first time in the United States, the plant retails for $19.95 and will be shipped in time for a summer full of America’s favorite food. Territorial Seed Company began offering the hybrid in December, but it’s already flying off the proverbial shelves.
“Right out of the gate it has become one of our most popular items for the year,” Russell said.
Besides the novelty, the benefits of the plant include saving garden space and being able to grow it independently in a pot that can survive on a city balcony as well as an urban farm. Plus, the plant produces about 100 cherry tomatoes and two to five pounds of white-fleshed common kitchen potatoes.
The plant came to be through grafting, a horticultural technique that fuses two plants together to combine the best parts of each. The root of one variety is chosen and combined with the top of another, in this case the root being potatoes and the top cherry tomatoes.
“If you cut them off and you put them together just right, they will heal together and when you grow the plant you can see a tiny little scar where they've been attached together. There are a number of different processes that have to do with age of the plant, the humidity it’s stored in, the light,” Russell explained. “It’s not like you cut two plants off, slap them together and they go. There’s a process to make sure they fuse and flourish.”
Luckily, that process has already been taken care of and all we have to do is click buy for a summer full of home-grown Ketchup ‘n’ Fries.