Okay, so if I thought T&M’s TomTato® (a tomato grafted onto a potato) was a curiosity this one has gone one further – Egg & Chips®, an aubergine or egg plant, grafted onto a spud.Again, it’s not completely nuts biologically; both the aubergine and potato belong to the same solanum family and fruit growers have been doing much the same thing with ‘family’ trees for years.

I’ve just received two plants to test, and I’ll be trying them out this year. I’ve never managed to grow aubergines in the open ground before, but this weekend, weather permitting, I’ll be finishing a new, upright cold frame that I can use as a greenhouse and I was planning on trying an eggplant anyway, so this will be the test.

At £14.99 per plant, it’s never going to be cost-effective, even if it does crop the promised four fruit and two kilos of spuds, but I’m hoping the flavour (like the TomTato the varieties have been withheld for copyright purposes) will be fantastic and that the plant itself will be enough of a novelty to make it worthwhile.

I realise I’m not Egg & Chips® target audience – my allotment is small, but not tiny, and this product will appeal most to courtyard and balcony gardeners (and those with children) but I’ll give this a go – and an honest review. Keep checking back – I’ll be returning to this.

May 13th: The Egg & Chips® plants arrived. Happily, for once I was home and able to get them out immediately. They’d been well-packed and had not become damaged in the post. I soaked them, then popped them out in the sunshine to recover.

May 15th My great friend Paul built me a mini greenhouse out of old rubbish found on skips. I planted up the Egg & Chips® and have popped them inside as the first incumbents.