Does anyone grow tomatillos?

[GardeningGal]

I decided to try some this year and I'm thinking I should put a tomato cage around them. I don't know what to expect so I'm curious if anyone else has tried to grow them and what your experience was like.

[Gormy Cuss]

1. Yep. Cage if you're not sure of its habit.

I grew an heirloom variety that produced smallish purple ones and the seed packet warned that the plants would either be indeterminate like a tomato or bushy. I had three plants, two of the trailing kind (I caged them) and one grew into a neat bush. I think most are trailers.

Three plants produced a ridiculous amount of fruit. The next year I still had tomatillos in the freezer from the previous summer.

[FloridaPat]

2. What do they taste like?

[Gormy Cuss]

3. Slightly sour, slightly acidic

Texture like a gooey tomato but not like it in flavor at all.

Green salsa often have tomatillo mixed with mild green chiles.

[wiggs]

4. Thought about putting mine in cage

...trying Tomatillos for first time and have a very healthy, spreading plant with a zillion tomatillo "balloons" forming. Hope they fill out with the fruit...right now they are hollow.

The plant is about 3' tall and 5' wide with branches that can't hold themselves up entirely. It just kind of sprawls. The effect is quite handsome...pretty plant. Not sure if a cage would have improved its habit of growth. I have a feeling it would have kept it vertical for a period of time, then the branches would have grown out horizontally anyway and flopped around.

[Gormy Cuss]

5. Of late I use ladders for tomatillos

The kind they sell in gardening catalogues for about $25 each, but I made my own from furring strips for about $10 each. Most of the expense was in the hinges. When I caged them the tomatillo vines would eventually drape over the sides and fall down to the ground. The only advantage to caging is that trellising effect keeps the fruit off the ground and that minimized insect damage.

About those balloons ---did you know that the flower called Chinese Lantern is another physalis? It forms the husk but the fruit is tiny at the point that the flower is harvested.

[OnionPatch]

6. Yes, they definitely need to be staked

or have cages. I grew them last year. I had about five plants and OMG you wouldn't believe how many I got! I still have cans of green salsa in the pantry that I put up last summer. And that was after I gave away baskets of them to friends and co-workers.

Mine weren't staked because I had never grown them before and didn't know how badly they would sprawl on the ground. Luckily, the papery cover on each fruit kept them from rotting on the ground. They are easy to grow and prolific. You'll be glad you planted them. I don't have any this year because I tried to use leftover seed from last year and none germinated. Too late now to buy new seed.

[GardeningGal]

7. Thanks everyone!

I'll be getting cages around them today.