Picture pulling potatoes out of the dirt from the same plant you just picked a handful of cherry tomatoes off of. Same stem. One plant. Two totally different foods.
That plant is real. It’s called a pomato, and no, it’s not a hoax or some science-fiction thing. People grow them in their gardens right now.
Here’s what it actually is, whether you can get one, and why, if it’s this cool, you don’t see it everywhere.
How one plant does both
A pomato is two plants joined into one by grafting.
Grafting just means you physically attach the top of one plant onto the roots of another so they grow together as a single plant. In this case, a cherry tomato plant is joined on top, and a potato plant sits on the bottom.
The result: tomatoes ripen on the vines up top, and potatoes grow underground from the same plant. You harvest the tomatoes through summer, then dig the potatoes once the plant starts dying back in fall.
Why do these two combine so well? Because they’re relatives. Tomatoes and potatoes both belong to the nightshade family, so their stems are similar enough to fuse. In fact the tomato and potato are close cousins, which is exactly why this trick works with them and not with, say, a tomato and an apple.
Wait, is a pomato a GMO?
Nope, and this is the part people assume wrong.
A pomato has nothing to do with lab DNA or genetic engineering. It’s made by grafting, which is a plain old gardening technique that’s been around for centuries. Gardeners were grafting tomatoes onto potatoes as far back as the 1800s.
Grafting doesn’t change any genes. It just physically sticks two plants together. So if the word makes you think of a science experiment, relax. It’s grafting, not the lab-DNA kind of thing.
There was one actual lab attempt back in 1978, where scientists fused tomato and potato cells together. It worked, sort of, but it was impractical and never went anywhere. The pomato you can actually grow is the simple grafted kind.
Can you actually buy one?
Yes, though you have to catch it at the right time of year.
The most famous one is the TomTato, launched in the UK by a company called Thompson and Morgan back in 2013. That was the first time anyone sold the pomato commercially. In the US, you’ll find the same idea sold as Ketchup ‘n’ Fries.
These show up as young grafted plants in spring, usually at garden centers or through mail-order seed companies. They sell out, they come and go by season, and they’re not in every store. But they’re a genuine product you can order and grow, not a myth.
One heads-up while we’re here: you eat the tomatoes and the potatoes, not the leaves. The green parts of the plant are mildly toxic, the same as any normal tomato or potato plant. Nothing weird, just the usual rule.
So why isn’t the pomato everywhere?
If a plant gives you two crops at once, you’d think everyone would grow it. Here’s why it stays a fun novelty instead of taking over.
It has to be grafted by hand. Every single pomato is made one at a time, by a person carefully joining two seedlings and letting them heal together in a greenhouse. That’s slow and expensive, which is why the plants cost more than a regular tomato seedling.
You can’t grow it from seed. Because the two halves stay genetically separate, saving seeds from a pomato won’t give you another pomato. You’d have to buy or graft a new one every year. That kills it as a big commercial crop.
The plant splits its energy. One plant feeding both a load of tomatoes and a crop of potatoes is doing double duty. The results are good, not record-breaking. Real farmers get way more by growing the two separately.
Add it up and the pomato lands where it belongs: a clever, space-saving curiosity for gardeners who think it’s fun, not a revolution in farming.
Can you make your own?
You can, if you like a project.
Grafting your own pomato means matching a tomato seedling and a potato seedling with stems of the same thickness, cutting them at an angle, joining them with a little clip, and keeping them warm and humid while they fuse. Plenty of hobby gardeners pull it off.
It takes patience and a bit of a green thumb, but there’s nothing magic about it. It’s the same grafting people have done for generations.
The bottom line
A pomato is one plant that grows tomatoes above ground and potatoes below, made by grafting two nightshade relatives together. It’s not a GMO, it’s not fake, and you can buy one as a TomTato or Ketchup ‘n’ Fries when they’re in season.
It never became a big deal for simple reasons: every plant is hand-grafted, you can’t grow it from seed, and splitting its energy two ways means neither crop is huge. Great garden novelty, not a farming breakthrough.
Still, growing dinner’s fries and ketchup on one plant is a pretty fun flex. Want more like this? I keep more tomato oddities people ask about over in the Common Questions section.