Following from a comment about pigs and chickens eating any old detritus, thought it’d be nice to ask your views about this little story
Hundreds of tomatoes growing on the coastline at Pegwell Bay are the result of combined sewer outfalls into the sea.
The bumper crop was spotted by designer Deva Corriveau during a walk near the former hoverport site.
He said: “I was walking down at the beach by the old hovercraft pad in Pegwell, and noticed literally hundreds of tomatoes growing right on the waterfront, which seemed very strange.
“At first, I thought it was quite an exciting, interesting oddity – or that maybe they weren’t tomatoes at all. But, then I decided to do a bit of research online, unfortunately, and rather disgustingly, I found out why there’s a bumper crop of tomatoes growing on the beach.
“Tomato seeds apparently are not broken down in the human digestive tract, so when Southern Water releases the sewerage overflows into the sea and onto the beach, these seeds are scattered onto the beaches where they happily take root.”
It’s interesting. We’re happy to throw a load of chicken pellets or other animal manure down to improve our home grown veg, but the thought of human pooh…No thank you.
Heard a story on Radio 4 a month or so ago about how someone has set up a fertiliser manufacturing business adjacent to (or indeed within) a sewage works. The product is identical to “traditional” man made fertilisers used on farms, cheaper and actually more environmentally friendly since the chemicals which are usually used require a lot of fuel to create them, but are largely inherent within human sewage.
In any case, towns and cities of yesteryear used to spread their human waste over nearby farmland.
Yes, that’s no surprise, they’ve always grown around sewage outlets in the Thames
And my Great Auntie May who lived in a cottage in Farleigh Wick with an outdoor bucket toilet at the top of the garden always grew excellent rhubarb and tomatoes which for some reason no one fancied
Can’t remember if it was OFC or elsewhere I mentioned it, but tinned citrus fruit involves getting a shed load of people to hand remove the skins before soaking the fruit in hydrochloric acid for a bit to remove pith residue, before soaking in peroxide to stop the acid from working any further, before washing and shoving into cans!
I don’t know…probably. I do know that once I had the idea of growing some birdseed into greens for my canaries, only to discover that the greens became poisonous and unfit for consumption. So seeds are fine, the sproutings are not. I imagine human foods would become the same
Presumably at some stage the sproutings would have developed flowerheads which had seeds in them which would have been safely edible?
Just wondering if there is any difference whatsoever between tomatoes grown in human pooh compared to those not grown in human pooh? I suspect that the usual comments about different textures/tastes is down to packaging and storing.
No canaries died in this investigation, Sheba, its ok. I began the process, saw the shoots and thought I’d better double check first. Canaries can eat many different things, but it occurred to me that nobody actually sold sproutings from seeds, so I looked it up, found out why and binned them.
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. Now I know why tinned mandarins are so tasteless!
