PLANT BY COLOUR FOR EXTRA-ORDINARY VEGGIES!
We grew up knowing that tomatoes are red, carrots are orange and beetroot are purple. Or so we thought.
What we didn’t know was that the first tomato ‘exported’ from Mexico to Spain some 500 years ago was orange. That’s according to New Zealand scientists at the Heritage Food Crops Research Trust (HFCRT).
Today’s red tomato stems from a cross between that orange tomato and a tiny red tomato, which probably came from Peru, according to Mark Christensen, a researcher at HFCRT.
What about carrots? There too we were mistaken: up until the mid-1500’s most carrots were purple, with some strains of white and yellow, until Dutch growers developed orange carrots from mutant strains of purple carrots.
