Hello Steemians,
As one living in the tropics of Africa, I am very much familiar vegetation, crops and plants. That is me calling them with all possible names. A whole lot of plants are found here. I live in the southern region of Nigeria and we have a wide array of plants.
However, even here, we have very popular and prevalent plants that you will in almost all places. Similarly, we have plants that are not very commonplace.
Some factors are responsible for how dominant or scarce a particular crop is. It might be due to some set of climatic conditions or due to it high demand and usage. How adaptable the plant is to some other conditions like the soil conditions and the likes, is also a deciding factor of the abundance or scarcity of a plant.
Down here, we have our own scarce and abundant plants. At a first guess, almost everyone know the cassava plant. It is the most popular staple food. Not many farms exist here which do not have cassava plant in them.
Young cassava plant.
Cassava is a tuber crop. The edible part is the root where it stores its food. Some persons however eat the leaves by using it to Cook. Still, there are differing opinions about how healthy this is as cassava has a high cyanide content which is very toxic.
The roots however is quite edible. It can be processed into in different end products. It can be made into garri, fufu or eaten as tiny pieces called "tapioca". This food types are highly sort after in this region.
This is garri an end product of the processing of cassava.
A farm with mixture of cassava and maize.
Another plant that is equally very prominent. It is maize. The maize plant usually go hand in hand with cassava. They can be cultivated together as they have different lifespan and yielding pattern.
A farm with growing maize plants. There are oil palm fruits, another popular plant.
A flourishing maize farm.
Maize is a shorter duration plant of about three months while cassava takes much longer up to a year or more.
A mixed cropping plot of maize and cassava.
A mature cassava plot close to harvest.
However, in my few years of experience, I have not been able to see any abundance of tomatoes and its close relative garden egg. From research, it has been speculated that the high nematode load of the soil here does not let it survive.
I haven't been able to sight a large size of farm with tomatoes. The few once have either resulted in huge loss to the farmer or resulted in very low yield.
A fruiting tomatoes plant.
I had great difficult sighting this particular one. It is not a common plant here at all. Though from time to time, people still attempt to cultivate but not with very much success.
A growing tomatoes plant that has begun yielding.
So if you happen to come down here, do not expect to see much tomatoes here but you are surely to have huge quantity of either the raw cassava or the ends products. I hope you have learned.