TomTato® Tomato and Potato in One Plant?

[grrlgeek]

On one of my internet tangents this afternoon, I found myself on the website of Thompson & Morgan, one of the UK's largest mail order seed and plant companies. They are also a major garden center retailer across Europe; so sayeth their website.

They are offering, beginning in spring 2014, a plant called the TomTato®. It's a grafted combination of a cherry tomato plant and a white potato plant. I swear I am not making this up!



https://www.thompson-morgan.com/vegetabl ... o/t47176TM

The plants are only available in the UK; they don't ship them anywhere else. I don't know if I like this or not , but I would probably devote a pot to it, just for the novelty, if I could get one. That's some serious maximization of available space!

If any members from the UK decide to grow one of these, I'd like a front row seat for the picture show at harvest time.

[valley]

girrlie, Kinda makes you wonder doesn't it. I'd have to see it to believe it.

Well, I went on the Thompson & Morgan site, they do indeed offer such an animal. I'd like to sit in the same row as you to view the results.

Richard

[tomf]

That is like the guy who’s apple tree had some branches broken off of it and grafted them onto a pine tree; now he has pineapples.

[rainbowgardener]

Something a little strange going on. I have seen the grafted tomato-potato plant in novelty catalogs for years. When I went to look for it now, the only one I can find is the T&M one and they are acting like it is a new thing. I'm thinking T&M must have gotten some kind of patent on it, prohibiting others from doing it.

The same kind of places used to carry the tomato potato as the fruit cocktail tree:


https://www.eburgess.com/detail.asp?pid=5556&nav=tre

In either instance, though the grafting can be done, that is no guarantee that the plant will survive or produce its multiple crops well. T&M does seem to have done their version a little more thoughtfully, with cherry tomato grafted to a late harvest potato, so the cherry tomatoes will have time to produce, before you have to destroy the plant to harvest the potatoes.

It is weird though that the tomato potato has just disappeared from all the catalogs that used to have it.

Here's a thread from 2012 where I quoted and showed a picture of the tomato potato from the Michigan Bulb catalog, which no longer carries this: https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... hp?t=45270

Here's another thread from 2010 where I mentioned and linked to a catalog that carried them. The link now only connects to the catalog home and it no longer carries them :

https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... hp?t=22776


Here's a recent thread about the T&M one: https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/vi ... =4&t=56288

[rainbowgardener]

It is worth noting from the first link above: When Michigan Bulb used to sell them, what you got came in a 2 1/4" pot, meaning they were grafting them when they were little seedlings and then selling them right away. That makes it seem real iffy, whether they would even survive.

Strangely there's a wiki article about the pomato which does not acknowledge that they were sold for years before T&M did it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pomato

T&M advertises that you get a 9 cm (4") plant for 15 pounds ($25). Still a very expensive small plant. Available only in Britain. And I did a bunch of looking around and all I could find was lots of ads and media hype (persisting in calling it "mutant" "hybrid" "bizarre" etc ) and not a single customer review or report of anyone's success or failure in actually growing it.

[PunkRotten]

I'd think the potato formation underground would cause the tomatoes up top to suffer, or vice versa. I'd like to see one of these plants and see the results.

[xtgold]

I used to get a brochure from a place back in the early 80's (I forgot the name) that sold all oddball grafts like that.Tomato /potato,pepper/potato but I always thought it was a joke.
It seems the tomato was always a cherry type.
Another graft is called ketchup n fries, if you google it.

[rainbowgardener]

If you look down in the Similar Topics at the bottom of the page, you will find a couple other threads about these.

In one of them I cited a reference to someone who had actual experience growing them. As you might expect with the tomatoes and potatoes competing with each other for water and nutrients, you get a smaller crop of each than you would planting them separately and it requires a LOT of water.

The tomatoes are cherry tomatoes and the potatoes are a late harvest variety, so you can get some of the tomatoes before you start digging it up for potatoes. Mostly a gimmick!