[Kierkegaard]

Great pics, Iva. Are those yours? I've never seen them. They're really pretty.

I just registered to this forum because I found this thread while googling Solanum sisymbriifolium. It took a while to get my account moderated, too. I'm growing it for the first time this year, and I'm super excited! My little seedling is about eight weeks old. It has three decent-sized adult leaves. I've had two of them start out of maybe thirty four-year-old seeds I've tried to start, and the other one died.

Over the past couple months I've become an internet expert on this plant. The husks around the fruit make you think of Physalis species, tomatilloes and groundcherries, but S. sisymbriifolium is in the nightshade genus, Solanum, with tomatoes, potatoes, and in the same subgenus, Leptostemonum, as eggplants. Like has been said, S. sisymbriifolium can be invasive, and it's naturalized in South Africa, parts of Australia, and the Southern U.S., outside of its native Chaco region in South America.

S. sisymbriifolium doesn't seem to be a plant that has ever had a place in traditional cultivation. In what I imagine is a consequence of its not being stabilized through breeding, I've heard contrasting descriptions of the taste of its fruit, and since I got my seeds from someone who didn't know it was edible, I'm scared mine won't taste well. Even in light of this plant's weedy nature, I'm a little bit enthralled by its looks--the spines, the shape of the leaves, the flowers, the fruits--and the fact that it's useful to human beings. If I had more space I'd like to refine a strain myself. Maybe we can get a good thread going about growing this plant for this summer and talk about our results when they come to fruition. Anyway, here is my two-month-old plant. I noticed today that the leaves showed a clear progression from rounded to fern-shaped.