Solanum pseudolulo anyone?

I was shopping for something else when I stumbled on these: https://www.mattspeppers.com/product-page/solanum-pseudolulo. So of course I ordered them too. Now I have them and I'm wondering if I really want to grow them. Anyone here have any experience with them?

Also, for reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solanum_pseudolulo
https://alchetron.com/Solanum-pseudolulo

It looks like there is a single other mention of this plant on Permies, but search only turns it up if you exclude the genus: https://permies.com/wiki/51209/Breed-Vegetable-Varieties-Carol-Deppe#452605

Also, I've got some germinating but they'll have to adapt to indoor growing conditions...

I recall doing a research project on the closely related naranjilla (S. quitoense) while in college.  Naranjilla is also uncommon outside of its native range.  It is also extremely sensitive to nematodes, and cultivating it is one of the things that accelerates slash-and-burn or swidden farming since the naranjilla is the first thing planted on newly cleared land, partly to avoid the nematodes that build up.  My project was grafting the naranjilla onto other nightshades more tolerant of nematodes (Fun fact....almost any nightshade will graft onto any other!)  I found that naranjillas grafted onto eggplant rootstock grew as fast as those on their own roots.  This might be an idea to save if you have nematode problems on your plants.

Alder Burns wrote:Fun fact....almost any nightshade will graft onto any other!

Yeah, one of my goals here is to step up my invasive horticulture skills by creating multiple long approach-grafts between these pseudolulo and tomato plants to see if I can force organelle transfer across the graft boundary and develop something weird. Anything that was obviously different would be interesting enough to justify the experiment even if it wasn't really desirable.

A brief update. You know how tomato plants have a distinctive aroma that’s kind of good when it’s subtle and a little gross when it’s overpowering? These plants have a similar odor, but distinctly different.

that family is so cool. i like how so far, these guys look like a cross between a ground cherry and a litchi tomato.

I wanted to update the thread with an image of the spikes on a mature(?) leaf. (Fingers for rough scale.). Those are on the top and bottom.

That's a monster plant Christopher! Any sign of flowers? I gather it is perennial, so hopefully will overwinter.

Not perennial in my climate. We're having our second solid frost of the year so two of them came indoors last night to winter in my plant tent under LEDs along with some chile plants. (They were all planted with that expectation, but I had a significant aphid infestation so they've been outside with the predators for 3-4 weeks.) Both of them have young leaf-buds at their apex, but no flower buds yet.

Christopher Weeks wrote:Yeah, one of my goals here is to step up my invasive horticulture skills by creating multiple long approach-grafts between these pseudolulo and tomato plants to see if I can force organelle transfer across the graft boundary and develop something weird. Anything that was obviously different would be interesting enough to justify the experiment even if it wasn't really desirable.

You might not have to settle for organelles only. If you could convince the graft union callus tissue to produce some vegetative buds, there's a chance that some of them might be effectively allopolyploid hybrids, by transfer of the entire nuclear genome from a cell of one species to a cell of the other. Here is a study where they did exactly that, though there was some tissue culture and genetic messing-around involved in this case. They do hypothesize that this might happen in nature, though, and that it might be a route to speciation by effectively hybridizing quite distantly related species.

Those are some cool and brutal-looking nightshades!

That would be the jackpot, for sure! The pseudololu are flat and broad while the tomatoes are tall, so I'm a little worried about just figuring out how to get the stalks side-by-side enough for the grafting. But I have a knife and parafilm standing by for when they're a little bigger.