You'll receive a variety of responses, that I know.

Most of the PL varieties I've grown have had stronger foliage cover, which is an advantage, and that's most, but not all.

My experience is that PL varieties are better able to withstand the four most common foliage diseases of Early Blight ( A. solani), Septoria Leaf Spot, both fungal, and Bacterial Speck and Bacterial Spot. I've suggested that it's possibly b'c the leaf cuticle might be thicker than that of RL leaves which would make attachement of the pathogens to the leaf surface more difficult.

I have no proof for that at all, but my observation has been that when it gets near Fall I see my RL varieties going down with the foliage disease of the season but the PL ones keep going. All of them? No, but many of them.

And there will be some folks who will say that they see no difference at all as to foliage disease susceptibility, but then again, it depends on any particular season since the foliage pathogens are spread by wind and rain, and some years can be foliage pathogen free as compared to other years, even with the same variety.

Taste? There are some great tasting PL's and some great tasting RL,s so I don't see that as a reason to grow mainly PL's, and indeed they are far fewer than RL's in number.

What has bothered me I'll admit, is so many varieties that are known to have PL variants of an original RL variety.

Let's say we have the variety Stop Snowing, which is RL, and someone finds a PL variant of that one and then calls it Stop Snowing Potato Leaf or says Stop Snowing (PL).

Does that mean that the PL variant is identical to the RL original? Possibly. But there's more than one genetic mechanism that can lead to a change in leaf form and some of those DNA mechanisms can lead to changes in more than one gene, possibly several genes.

The PL gene is C, which is dominant to c, its allele

CC = RL, homozygous dominant
Cc = RL, heterozygous
cc = PL, homozygous recessive.

If a variety is Cc then a single spontaneous mutation can lead to cc and all is the same except for leaf form. But there's no infomation that says variety X is Cc or CC.

Some have compared the following varieties:

Cherokee Purple RL
Cherokee purple Potato Leaf ( found by Jere Gettle)
Spudakee, also Cherokee Purple PL ( found by Bill Malin)

When grown in the same season there are differening reports as to whether the Gettle and Malin ones are the same as to taste and performance and whether each of them individually are different from CP itself.

There are several other examples I could use.

my point? Don't necessarily assume that a PL variant of an RL original is the same until you've grown both in the same season with your conditions so that you can compare them directly and see what you think.

Carolyn, an no, PL varieties are not more prone to crossing as was stated in the old literature. I and quite a few others have grown a few thousand varieties each and our collective experience is that PL's don't cross more frequently than RL's

Thanks.

I've spent the last 30 years or so (since I started seriously helping my dad at age 10-12), growing pretty much the same collection of reliable, standard varieties -- Early Girl, Better Boy, Rutgers, Big Boy, Beefsteak, Jubilee, Yellow Pear, and Sweet 100 (I've never been happy with Supersweet 100 -- too candy sweet and not enough tomato tang). In western PA and western MA these were excellent varieties that produced well and stood up well to whatever nature threw at them.

Since a change of gardening zone and climate has forced me to branch out after finding many of my old standards failing on me I got curious. I'm not sure I've ever seen a potato leaf tomato so I'll be certain to plant one or two this year. :-)

Since a change of gardening zone and climate has forced me to branch out after finding many of my old standards failing on me I got curious. I'm not sure I've ever seen a potato leaf tomato so I'll be certain to plant one or two this year. :-)

*****

If you go to the FAQ link at the top of this first page and scroll down when you get to the FAQ's, look for the one about leaf forms and you'll see what a PL looks like.

I have three very close friends, not including my brother, he's my brother, who garden in NC and they can grow any old variety they want to, so I wouldn't let your new location be a problem to you and I'm not sure why you can't grow down there what you grew up here.

Three of those folks mentioned above live in the Raleigh area, or just a few miles away and the 4th lives north of Asheville in the mountains, and I just rememebred a 5th who lives to the NE of ASheville but commutes a long distance to ASheville for work and he also grows about anything he want to.

So branch out, grow some heirlooms, some PL, and some PL, and see how it goes.

Carolyn, who notes that you do have some diseases down there which we don't have up here and Tomato Spotted Wilt virus and Fusarium are two of them.

I'm well south of Raleigh in the sandhills -- totally different geology with totally different soil from the notoriously fertile, southern, red clay. Essentially its beach sand minus the salt -- geologically, a couple interglacials ago this was the beach.

Of my old favorites, only Jubilee and yellow pear have stood up to the combination of appallingly infertile soil, heat, humidity, and drought. So I'm branching out into new territory in search of tomatoes that will grow here without pampering and its turning out to be a lot of fun seeing how much was out that that I hadn't known of until tomato failure shook me out of my rut.

I can't wait until the friends at work who had never seen a yellow tomato until I brought Jubilees in my lunch see what I'm going to grow this summer!