3 Different Tomato Leaf Types Potato, Regular, And Rugose

In this blog, we will explain the difference in tomato leaves. We found, growing tomatoes, some customers prefer one leaf type over another.

Tomato Potato Leaf

Potato Leaves On Tomato Plants – Potato Leaves are more smooth and rounded leaves. I like Potato Leaf version tomato plants because they seem to produce bigger fruits and more abundant. The reason for this is being a larger leaf, and leaves are solar panels for a plant. The bigger the leaf, the more sunlight it can absorb and store. Compared to the other leaf versions, these are the less common ones for sale and traded and are more sought after.

Tomato Regular Leaf

Regular Leaves On Tomato Plants – Regular Leaves on tomato plants, these are the most common leaf types. These leaves have jagged edges to them. They are not as big as the Potato Leaves, so less of a solar panel to absorb energy from the sun. An example of this is if there are 2 versions of the same kind of tomato, a Potato Leaf version and a Regular Leaf version, the Potato Leaf version will have bigger fruits. Yes, you can have both leaf types for 1 variety, Chocolate Stripes is a variety we know of that has both versions. How you get 2 versions is over years of grow outs sometimes leaves mutate and this is how you get both leaf versions.

Tomato Rugose Leaf

Rugose Leaves On Tomato Plants – Rugose Leaves on tomato plants are on dwarf tomato plants. Rugose means that the leaves are bumpy and have wrinkles to them, a more textured leaf. But the leaf will still be a Potato Leaf or a Regular Leaf, and Rugose will be added to the description because it is not smooth but has the textured bumps on the leaves.

Sucker Leaves (side note)

Sucker Leaves (side note)  –  Sucker leaves, which we like to remove from my plants because they suck the energy that can be put toward the fruits that results in bigger tomatoes. Below is a picture named sucker leaf location and where it is located on the tomato plant. It is a small leaf that starts to grow at the Y between the stem and the branch with all the leaves that will produce fruits. In the picture you can see we removed the sucker but left a little on the plant from pinching and removing the sucker leaf.

We hope this blog helps to better identify tomato leaf types. Maybe after reading this post you might prefer to grow a certain leaf type too.