“I was standing out on my back porch at 3 this morning,” said Otis Mewwee, of London, Alabama. “I could hear them going off even in the far fields.”
“We only have a small garden patch, a row of plants out by the garage,” said Leslie Havens, an urban resident of Shreveport, LA. “Sometime after midnight, I was awakened by what sounded like gunfire. I got my wife and kids and we all hid, squatted down in the bathroom. I mean, we were scared. It was scary.”
Tomatoes don’t explode only at night. Jake Knox, of the South Carolina Extension Program at the University of South Carolina, explained. Cloudy days are more likely to accompany the detonations, but they can occur on sunny days as well.
“Between the excessive moisture of the last sixteen weeks, and the naturally high mineral content of the soil, you’re bound to get some detonation in the more bulbous vegetables,” Knox said. “Usually, these are your tubers, your potatoes, turnips, parsnips and such. But it can occur in viney fruits such as tomatoes as well.”
While there have been no reports of exploding potatoes yet, Knox suspects this is due to the fact that tubers grow underground.
“Come harvest time, they’ll find their turnips’re pre-mashed, I’m afraid.”]]>
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