#lantern-armory

love u both. <3

Yep! If you’ve ever been close to a tomato plant, have you noticed that its stem was covered in fuzzy, kind of sticky hairs? Little insects get stuck to those, die there, and their corpses fall off and feed the tomato plant. This is a great source of nitrogen, something animals have a lot of but plants have trouble getting, and I could be wrong, but I think it’s what makes some plants have more “protein” (technically, all life is made of proteins) and taste “meatier” than others (e.g. nuts, legumes--legume-bearing plants actually have a whole sophisticated relationship going on with nitrogen-fixing bacteria living in their roots!). In other words, tomatoes are possibly more delicious and nutritious because of their protocarnivory! Of course, it’s still controversial that they should be considered protocarnivorous, but it counts in my book.

It’s funny, though, because to other plants, tomatoes are these helpless little plump things they can push around and steal nutrients from. So, sometimes gardeners plant marigolds around them as bodyguards, because marigolds are territorial assholes and will aggressively poison any plant that encroaches on their territory!

As an aside, the very closely related tobacco plant has a very complicated relationship with insects itself! One of their primary pollinators is the Carolina hawk moth, a gorgeous moth that mimics a hummingbird uncannily well. However, their larvae are the tobacco hornworms, which are major pest on tobacco plants! In times when it doesn’t have to put up with them, the tobacco plant will call on parasitoid wasps to come deal with them, or just open its flowers earlier to cater to different pollinators who *won’t* lay eggs that hatch into little hellions on them.

Bread Maiden

The three sections of your skill tree are: 

Baguette Bachelorette

Royal Pain

Danish in Distress