Solanum

A warm-season member of the nightshade family (Solanaceae) — a relative of tomato, potato, and pepper — grown for its showy, glossy edible berries that range from white and green through deep purple to nearly black depending on cultivar. The plant is technically a tender herbaceous perennial but is grown as an annual vegetable across most of North America, where it demands a long, hot, frost-free season to fruit well. Drooping violet star-shaped flowers give way to the familiar pendant fruit; the leaves, flowers, stems, and roots are toxic and only the fruit is eaten.

A warm-season annual vegetable in the nightshade family, grown for fresh summer fruit. Tomatoes need full sun, consistent moisture, slightly acidic soil, and night temperatures above 50°F. Larger fruits like beefsteaks can struggle in extended hot southern summers because flowers drop without setting fruit.

The world’s fourth most important food staple — a cool-season nightshade grown as an annual for the starchy tubers that swell underground on stolons. Above ground it makes a bushy, knee-high mound of compound pinnate leaves topped, briefly, by white-to-purple star-shaped flowers with a bright yellow anther cone. The tubers are the only part eaten: leaves, stems, fruit, and any green-skinned tuber carry the toxic glycoalkaloid solanine.