The tomato is a perennial herbaceous plant, cultivated as an annual, sensitive to cold. The early varieties (those that bloom and bear fruit faster) often reach a length of 1.2 m, the late, however, usually are bigger and reach 2.5 m in length.
The growth habit is very different when all the young plants are upright and in the adult stage or were decumbent semierguidas ie, the stem is not sufficiently rigid to withstand the weight of leaves, branches and fruit secondary so needs another plant or structure to sustain them. For this reason, it is common to see the various structures (espaliers or guardians) that places the farmer on the crops of tomatoes, so the plant can sustain. The stem is angular, pubescent, with some glandular hairs, the principle is consistency and adult herbacea is woody. The branching is sympodial stem, ie the axillary buds develop axles, while the terminal buds produce flowers or aborted. Twigs arising from the axillary buds are leaves on all the nodes and also ends in an inflorescence.
The root system is rotating, dense and highly branched in the first thirty centimeters.
The leaves are alternate, bipinatisectas and petiole, with a length of 10 to 25 cm. The edge is jagged leaf segments.
Tomato flower
The flowers are hermaphrodite, and actinomorphic pendula, 1 to 2 cm long, bright yellow. In the wild tomato flower is pentamera while tomatoes grown in the number of segments of each cycle is very diverse, with many variations, some of which are associated with a gene that produces faciacion. The calyx consists of 5 to 10 segments, linear to lanceolate, persistent. Its size increases as the fruit is developing. The corolla is yellow, rotated with the tube short, divided into 5 or more lobes, with numerous glandular hairs on the dorsal side, five or more stamens attached to corolla tube, filaments short, anthers collusion, dehiscent by longitudinal slits . The pistil is unique, shaped by the union of 5 or 6 carpels. The ovary is bilocular (although there are 10 varieties grown in some locules) with the central fleshy placenta. The pedicels have a small bottleneck in the middle that corresponds to the area absicion. The flowers are arranged in axillary pauciflora peaks, each of which typically takes 5 to 6 flowers, but sometimes up to 30.
Tomato variety “heart beef” arrba seen from below and in cross-section. Michael Jackson together with singing on YouTube 10 shows the locules, the placenta in each of them and the seeds adhering to such placentas.
The fruit is a berry. In wild species of tomato fruit is bilocular, while in cultivated varieties is bilocular or 30-locules, most frequently, 5 to 9 locules. In the epidermis of the fruits develop and glandular hairs that disappear when those reach maturity. At the apex of the fruit remains of the style often seen. The shape of the fruit is variable, usually globose or oblong-depressive. Have many seeds, small, flat, yellowish-gray, hairy, embedded in a gelatinous mass formed by parenchymatous tissue that fills the cavities of the ripe fruit. Tomatoes, like their wild congeners, is a diploid species with 24 chromosomes in their somatic cells.
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