Megablooms: Fused Tomato Blossoms

I posted a while back about how epic some of my tomato flowers are. Both of my Black Krim plants have these freaky huge blossoms. I noticed that they seemed to be some sort of 2-flower mutant, and one of them has started to fruit unevenly now. It’s weird though, because there is one mutant blossom per flower cluster – all of the other ones in each group seem normal. Turns out these big guys are ‘megablooms’ or fused blossoms, and are much more likely to happen on large varieties of tomatoes.

Megabloom on garden Black Krim.

 Container Black Krim megabloom

You are probably wondering, do these megablooms make megatomatoes? And the answer is yes! – if they are sufficiently pollinated. Since there is more than one flower, the blossoms need to be pollinated more than once, or the tomato will develop unevenly, and likely be cat-faced. Some people pinch off these blossoms, since the fruit will probably be undesireable to eat, but I’m too curious for that.

I am now very much looking forward to the forthcoming art tomatoes :)