Of the plants that I’m currently growing in my garden this year, I am currently anticipating the results of this one the most.

It’s a Physalis.

I’ve grown several species of Physalis before.

I’ve grown several cultivars of tomatillos, of course — identified variously by different vendors as Physalis ixocarpa, Physalis philadelphica and Physalis philadelphica subs. ixocarpa.

I’ve grown, as a curiosity, plants from a line of seeds in my inventory which I think could probably be Physalis walteri — an uncultivated groundcherry species that grows naturally across the Southeastern United States in sandy areas along the coast.

I’ve also grown cultivars identified as Physalis pruinosa, a species that has « groundcherry » as one of its common names.

Groundcherries are easy to grow. Sow a seed, maybe two, in damp soil in the cells of a seed tray ; water them regularly, each time before the soil can completely dry out. For each cell you sow, you will likely get one plant, often two if you sowed two seeds per cell — the same high germination rate that you get with tomato and pepper seeds, though they might take slightly longer to germinate than a tomato seed would.

They fruit reliably too. In fact, even if you never transplanted them from their starting cell into a larger pot or into the ground, they will almost certainly still fruit — though each mature one- to two-inch plant may only produce one or two berries. But they do not require much space at all to successfully reproduce.

When I’ve grown them, the fruit have been pleasant, though not amazing — and have unfortunately been innumerous and small. Even when they are given more than enough space for their roots to spread as they will, they still often don’t become very big plants.

I plan to continue to test different methods, as the sparse quantity, and perhaps some of the smallness, could have been due, at least in part, to growing methods.

But it seemed like they might be a very different cultivar (and, therefore, also potentially a completely different species) than the fruit I first tried, the ones that prompted me to try growing them myself in the first place. When I tried them for the first time, I loved them — and the prospect of having large quantities of them available to pick and eat every summer I found very appealing.

That’s where the anticipation comes from now.

I now have, and am growing out, seeds that I know for certain came from fruit with the traits I’ve been searching for.

The fruit were quite big, many with a diameter up to 2 cm. They also had great flavor — very sweet, the right amount of tartness — and other nice traits I might be better at describing over time.

I don’t know what the mature plants will look like yet. I don’t know how tall they will get or how much fruit they will produce. I don’t know what variation exists among individual plants grown similarly nor in what ways they are affected by modifications in growing conditions.

But I do know I have a strain of seeds that can, under the right circumstances, grow into a plant that produces the type of fruit I want to eat.

One identification given for this plant was Physalis peruviana ; I can’t be sure if that’s accurate.

Some of the reports I’ve read of plants grown from seeds labelled as Physalis peruviana have described them as taller and more upright, producing significantly more sizable fruit than P. pruinosa. Plants identified as this species are more often given the common name « Cape gooseberry », « goldenberry » or « Inca berry », as compared to « groundcherry » (though some people seem to just call all edible, sweet Physalis species « groundcherries », as often happens with the naming of similar and easy to confuse things).

In the future, I plan to grow out, probably from several sources, more seeds identified as named cultivars of P. pruinosa.

In addition to the seeds with known potential characteristics that I am working with now (which might well be P. peruviana), plants grown from the various stocks of commercially-available seed specifically identified as P. peruviana might also produce desirable fruit. So I’ll likely try that too.

In any case, I look forward to seeing what these Physalis plants look like as they mature and whether they can reliably produce the kind of fruit that their parent plants did.

I’ll report back on the results.