Cape Gooseberry

My Cape Gooseberries waited till Fall to go into mass production.

Have you grown them before? I love them.

I have grown the red chinese lantern (I do eat those have the lantern has turned to paper). This is my first year for the cape gooseberry. What I bought as a large cape gooseberry I think are small tomatillo. They are awfully green even after the husk are papery.

I've never eaten Chinese Lantern but I have seen/heard of Tomatllo, Cape Gooseberry and Ground Cherry being mislabeled (both seeds and plants) by reputable sources. That could really screw up a new gardener. It is my understanding that 2 tomatillo plants are needed to produce fruit.

I bought 2 tomatillo plants that were suppose to be the large variety. They are both producing fruit that is much smaller than what you find at the grocery store. The gooseberries are from seed They are planted in the same raised bed that was divided by a board that I placed in the middle. Could cross pollination cause the problem with their size?

I don't know if they can X. But you shouldn't notice it in this generation, anyway. I hope somebody else will chime in. It seems like Ive read so much about the seed packet saying one thing but the plant turned out to be one the other ones mentioned above.

What -- a seed companies description is exaggerated or wrong?! Never! That said, it's been kinda cool this summer over in North Alabama. Maybe the same is true for Peachtree, GA? We haven't really had the long, deep heat they like, and it's certainly too cool for them now. It may just be a poor year for them.

Unfortunately the common names in this genus is a royal mess, even more so than normal, and in this genus, what species you are getting is a total crapshoot. I would not assume any labels on them are accurate, just eat 'em if you like 'em.

Most of the Physalis genus is self-incompatible. You might get some fruit off a single plant, but not much, and those fruit will be small with sterile seeds. We do have several native Physalis spp. growing in the wild throughout the southeast and the whole US. Physalis spp. can cross successfully with other species' within the genus, but how often this happens in the wild is not really known and it's probably not common. Not many plants freely cross species' and we'd probably be up to our neck in random crosses if these did.

I've gotten tons of Ground Cherries from a single plant. A fellow DGer thought he had tomatillo seeds but didn't know he should have more then one plant, turned out they were GC and that one plant gave him enough to make jam. The Cape Gooseberry plants, I started from seed a few years ago, came back the next year like crazy but the drought stopped them in their tracks.

I agree it's a crapshoot which makes it hard when you sell plants. Lol

Here are a couple of pictures of the tomatillo and the gooseberries. I placed a quarter near them to show there size. The first pic is the Tomatillo and the second is the gooseberries. As you can see by the coin comparison the size is off for the gooseberries.