A friend is growing these for the 1st time. There is no direction given by the vendor regarding whether this variety requires another tomatillo as a pollinator as do the green ones.
Would Aunt Molly's ground cherry be compatible with the purple one as a pollinator? Or does it need to be another of the same variety.
Aunt Molly does fine on her own.
Anyone know?

I grew just one plant last year and it did fine. However, it was at the community gardens and there were others planted there. My guess is that it can be planted out on it's own because the others were perhaps 30 feet away.

Johnny's says they need 2 plants. Poking around, everything I read said tomatillos as a whole need cross pollination.

[mention]Growing Coastal[/mention]
Yes, Purple De Milpa does seem to need a pollinator (in my limited experience, which could be misleading). No, Aunt Molly's ground cherry won't work. I've grown them both.

Aunt Molly's ground cherry doesn't need a pollinator, though. It'll even fruit indoors with little to no encouragement. It should also be noted that Aunt Molly's ground cherry is a different species (AM is Physalis pruinosa, and PDM is Physalis philadelphica), although both plants are in the same genus; sometimes you can get plants of different species to pollinate each other, but that doesn't seem to be the case with ground cherries and tomatillos (which do not seem to cross-pollinate each other).

You shouldn't need a different variety of tomatillo to pollinate Purple De Milpa, though. Multiple Purple De Milpa plants should work, as long as they're not cuttings of the same plant). I mean, each plant needs to be from a different seed.

You can get fruit on tomatillos without a pollinator, but supposedly, you get a lot more with one. I imagine if you selected for self-pollinated fruit, you might get plants that entirely self-pollinate after an undetermined number of generations. I've heard that there are self-pollinating tomatillos out there, but that might be a myth.

I had last year something called purple tomatillo. It made monstrous plants with monstrous production, it set hundreds of fruits and bees were going crazy for the flowers. I am sure there was no other person growing tomatillos.

It needs another plant of tomatillo, it can be the same variety. So just plant two of the same. I'm pretty sure ground cherry won't work.

Thank-you for your replies. Just what we needed to know.