Grafting tomatoes

I learn something new every day!  Thanks Mark.

Yes very interesting, thanks Mark

Well they can now stand being in the open air in our conservatory. 1 or 2 were wilting a bit when it went over 35C this afternoon but they should come on quickly now. Frosts forecast for the next few days could be a problem but will need potting on first. All but 3 survived their ordeal so will select the stronger looking ones to plant out.

These 2 pictures show how grafting does set them back a bit. The ones on the right are some that were just potted on and were the weaker plants of the varieties grown. The grafted tomatoes are on the left.

           

When the graft has take, the silicone clips still give needed support and don't need to be removed as the stems growing are strong enoughto expand them and eventually you can remove them or let them be flicked off (and potentially lost). The first time I grafted tomatoes, I started removing the clips at this stage and broke some in the process. So now leave them till they are nearly disloged by the plant.

They are now ready for carefully potting on into 3.5" pots

.    

Planted them out on 8th May. A little early but no more frosts were forecasted.

They were supported by canes but just got round to tying them up properly today. Plenty of flowers and growing strongly now. They had first feed last week.

Picture of the greenhouse.

   

Fascinating, Thanks Mark.
Your toms look extremely healthy.

Yours are bushier than mine (would you believe autocorrect put 'bustier'  ) some wresting in very small pots.  Grafting  seems to work well for you.

Yours are bushier than mine (would you believe autocorrect put 'bustier'  ) some wresting in very small pots.  Grafting  seems to work well for you.

The main reason I graft is so that I can plant in the border soil so watering is not as critical. At about this time otherwise, the plant would start getting sickly and I would end up with just 3 or possibly 4 trusses of fruit on them. I think it is a wilt which may have been introduce with growing strawberries in the greenhouse one year.

They might look bushier as I let 2 vines grow on each plant reducing the number of plants needed. Also 2 of them are Roma VF which is not a cordon variety. These are supposed to be wilt resistant and I was thinking if they grow well, I would try using them as a rootstock to graft onto next year as I could save seeds from these.

This is a really interesting thread. Are there many other soft-stemmed plants that can be grafted like this? I think I've heard of it with aubergines. Anything else?

When I was a child, my brothers and I all planted narcissi bulbs and kept them on the windowsills by our beds. My older brother's looked like it was going to flower first, and I was so overcome with jealousy (at about 4 or 5 years old) that I decided to just give the stem a little pinch with my fingernails while nobody else was around. Well, it snapped right in two! In a desperate attempt to avoid being discovered, I sellotaped it back together, taking great care to line the ends up exactly. Somehow it didn't die right away, and actually went on to flower, though the flower did fade rather quickly!

At one point, my mother brought all of the plants together because between them they showed each stage of the flowering process - brother one's fading, brother two's in full flower, and mine in bud. She was holding them aloft and waving them about and I was sure she was going to see the sellotape, but apparently not. (Indeed, many years after the event, it occurred to me that she absolutely knew, and was waving them about in the hope of identifying the guilty party - though she has no recollection of it, so maybe I really did get away with it!)

You can graft aubergine and peppers onto tomatoes and some people have grafted a tomato onto a potato but that would need to use a different technique. I think another method is to half cut through both plants when they are a bit bigger than i do it. then join them together and when the join heals, cut off the unwanted top and bottom. A nursery I visited earlier this year was selling grafted plants like that. A problem with that method can be that the 2 plants grow at different speeds before it heals so the graft pulls apart.
There are a few YouTube videos on grafting.

Melons can be grafted too, when I worked on a melon farm we had to spend a few hours walking through a field snipping the gourds off the rootstock. Presumably cucumbers and squash can be grafted also.