Fast-food restaurants and vegetable gardens are usually seen as very different, but one gardener’s experiment linked a McDonald’s burger to a surprising tomato crop. James Prigioni creates popular gardening videos on YouTube. In one video, he aimed to grow a tomato plant using seeds from a tomato slice on a McDonald’s burger. He chose a Deluxe Quarter Pounder with cheese, removed a tomato slice, and extracted two seeds. After cleaning the seeds to help them sprout, he was ready to plant them.
Prigioni wanted to explore another way to test the seeds, so he took a slice of tomato from a second Quarter Pounder and planted the whole slice instead of just the seeds. With a heat mat and grow lamp, both planting methods produced seedlings in about a week. Once the seedlings were strong enough, he separated them to grow better on their own, later planting one in the ground and another in a 5-gallon bucket. He showed how he pruned the lower leaves affected by blight and used a tomato cage for support as the plants grew and produced fruit. He also added fertilizer and mulch to the plant in the bucket.
After three months, both plants yielded a lot of tomatoes. The plant in the ground did better than the one in the bucket, which Prigioni attributed to inadequate watering during hot weather. The bucket plant ripened its fruit more quickly, likely due to stress. Overall, the results were impressive for a plant that began from a burger. The ground plant produced an abundance of tomatoes.
Prigioni noted that the fruit from both plants was sweet and tasty. By the end of the fourth month, the ground plant faced some health issues but continued to produce fruit. He mentioned that the plant had so many tomatoes that ripening became challenging. He expressed surprise at how productive the plant was, stating he had never seen so much fruit on a single tomato plant.
He also highlighted his curiosity about the type of tomatoes that would grow from the seeds. He initially thought they might be beefsteak tomatoes, but they turned out to be Roma. He suspected that the McDonald’s tomato was a hybrid, which can lead to uncertainties when saving seeds for future planting.
Prigioni compared the McDonald’s tomatoes to other Roma tomatoes he grew from seeds bought at Lowe’s. He pointed out that while the commercial seeds produced a smaller harvest, the fruit ripened more evenly, allowing him to gather more ripe tomatoes directly from the vine.
He concluded that he was amazed by the productivity of the plants and considered this experiment one of his favorites. The idea of growing a tomato plant from a cheeseburger and harvesting many tomatoes from it provided a unique experience. What do you think about using fast-food items to grow plants?
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Source: Upworthy, by Annie Reneau