Plant · P-939

Tobacco

Nicotiana tabacum

Tobacco is a fast-growing annual grown for its leaves which are dried and cured into pipe cigarette and cigar tobacco and historically pressed for a nicotine-based insecticide and insect repellent. Native to South America and long naturalized across central and southern Europe; it is not known to persist in truly wild habitat and is grown almost exclusively in cultivated beds. Wants full sun to partial shade - afternoon shade helps where summers run hot - and reaches 1-3 m (3-10 ft) tall and 0.3-0.6 m (1-2 ft) wide in a single season on moist well-drained soil that ranges from sandy through loamy to clay and from mildly acidic through neutral to mildly alkaline; tolerates occasional dry spells once established. Rated zone 7-11 and grown as a warm-season annual everywhere outside that range; damaged by temperatures in the mid-20s F and below. Seed is surface sown in a warm greenhouse about ten weeks before the last expected spring frost and germinates in ten to twenty days at 20 C. All parts of the plant are poisonous - the nicotine they contain causes nausea vomiting sweating and palpitations and absorbs readily through skin - so handling calls for gloves and it should be sited away from children and stock. A protein extracted from the leaf has been developed as an odourless tasteless egg-white substitute distinct from the whole poisonous leaf.