New Love Apple Varieties Certified

Four new tomato varieties, recommended and certified by the National Seed Committee, have been approved by the Agricultural Research Institute of Panama.

This means that the tomatoes – known as  T7-T8-T9 and large integer - are being planted during the November to December agricultural cycles in the provinces of Herrera and Los Santos on the Azuero Peninsula, La Prensa reports.

The tomato is the world’s most popular fruit, followed by the banana and then the apple.  Over 130 million tons of thousands of tomato varieties are produced a year with China being the largest producer, followed by the United States and Turkey, according to tomato.org.

The fruit, first cultivated in 700 AD by Aztecs and Incas in South America, was brought back to Europe from Mexico by Spanish explorers in the 16th century.  The French called them pommes d’amour or love apples, believing them to have aphrodisiacal powers.

The scientific term for the common tomato is lycopersicum, which mean wolf peach. It is a botanical cousin of the chili pepper, potato, eggplant, tobacco and the poisonously hallucinogenic belladonna.