Has anyone grown grafted toms? If so do you graft your own or buy them. What was your results? I've been reading about them and might give it a try.
Sounds like fun. The only thing about grafting tomatoes is after it is done the plant needs lots oh humidity and low light. I ran across that morsel of info somewhere when I started growing that type of deer food. Sounds like they will have to be grown in a greenhouse. Jerry
Just one question,,with the wide variety to choose from,,why do it ? Other than just to see if you can ? There is no guarantee that a grafted plant would be better than the plant you are taking the grafts from. In my opinion due to the cellular structure of a tomato, it would make it less hardy & productive if it were a grafted plant. Why not just buy the plant you want rather than try to graft your variety to another rootstock?
Donna, I was at a growers conference today and the last session was on....grafting. I learned a few new tricks and techniques for the process. I tried this last year thinking "this doesn't sound too hard to do" . I gave it a whirl and found it is much harder to do than I realized. The grafting procedure itself is easy, the success rate was poor. First question though? Is there a reason you want to grow them? Do you have soil born disease issues you are struggling with? if not, dont wast any more time or money on the plants. Most people grow them if there is a disease issue that the variety they want to grow is susceptible to the disease you know is in your soil OR they want better productivity from the plants. Do either of these reasons factor into the idea of trying them? If you are still interested I got a web address for a manual that someone from OSU put together and is available for free to anyone. I will have to get it for you tomorrow, though.
In the nurseries here they have been selling[trying to]a tomato plant grafted onto a potato planr for people who don't have room for either.They never look attractive to me though.
Donna, Here you go... http://hcs.osu.edu/vpslab/ I will try this again this year...I hope I am more successful at it with it a little more info. I was flying by the seat of my pants last year. I will also add that I grew 5 of them last year and we had a wet cold summer. I just wanted to try grafting, not because I had a soil born issue, just the challenge of it. Needless to say I was disappointed with the success rate. I was expecting to be/do better, but there is a learning curve and there are little techniques that just help or make or break the process. I grew my 5 toms in a row with other toms and tried the Fla weave which resulted in a serious failure for me. They grewup tall and then fell over and broke, tangling the stems together, hiding the tomatoes inside the "canopy" of disaster and then I couldn't get spray inside for the disease issues we were battling last year. Now, with all that "encouragement" go get it done. . ALSO.. DON'T bother with expensive rooting stock seeds. Just try on whatever you have available to begin with. The rootstock seed is VERY expensive and wasteful when the graft is a fail. So go ahead and try on cheaper seeds such as celebrity or even cherry tomato seed varieties as your rootstock. Also you will need to start a bunch of seeds of each kind at different times, maybe a week apart for several weeks so you have scion and rootstock of same size to work with. IF you have rootstock variety seeds to work with start them a week or even two weeks before the scion you plan to use. They are slower to germinate and grow than the non rootstock varieties.
Try to do quite a few of them. If you are successful you can always give them away or sell them if you can find an outlet close by.
