Grafted tomatoes

[Odsox]

Has anyone tried grafted tomato plants, or more interestingly has anyone grafted tomato plants themselves ?
I have seen the advent of grafted vegetable plants expand in the seed catalogues over the last few years and wondered if all the advertising hype is anywhere near true.
I can see the benefits of a strong rootstock plant combined with a plant with flavourful fruit that maybe has a weak root system, but whether it's worth the extra bother intrigues me. As I have a reasonable amount of space for growing, adverts claiming 75% more fruit from a grafted plant have less appeal as I can just grow an extra plant and get 100% more, but even so ....

[oldjerry]

The commercial growers in Wocestershire seem to use them all the time.I think it's not just yield/flavour but also disease resistance,which is becoming ever more important as 'organic' stuff becomes more popular,and chemical treatments become more expensive.
I'm sure they showed us how to do it when I was at Pershore but I'd bunked off that week.
The process should be dead easy for a man of your calibre,but choosing which to put together,hmmm....
Bear in mind your average commercial tom grower will buy the plants in so probably won't have a scooby about the grafting process,it'll be a PHD thesis jobby,do people publish them online? Anyhow,keep us posted,an interesting thing to do.
Sometime you need to publish all your tomato experience

[Odsox]

Yes, it looks relatively easy OJ, especially the latest way of just "wounding" the stems of two plants and bringing them together. Then when they have fused cut the top off the rootstock and the roots off the scion. I have found that the rootstock used is Aegis with seeds available on-line, so not an impossibility ....
Do you know if they use grafted stock for commercial hydroponics ?

[oldjerry]

Don't know for sure,but I'd guess they'd be bound to,so much capital outlay involved,they'd have to go for maximum product value.

(Can't believe I said that!!).

[Millymollymandy]

The only experience I have with growing something grafted (done by someone else I hasten to add) is the melon Petit Gris de Rennes, which is traditionally grafted onto some other melon rootstock. That was the only melon I grew successfully outside here with about 15 fruit (maybe more, can't remember) on the one plant, which were of a reasonable size. The next year I tried again with saved seed but got absolutely nowhere, even worse results than buying in seeds of bog standard Charentais melon (best I can manage is a tennis ball size and not always even tasty or sweet!).

I did have some disease on the grafted Petit Gris but mostly it was just affecting the skin and not the fruit.

I do wonder if it is worth it though for tomatoes, as they seem to do all right on their own accord.

[Marc]

I don't think they'd be needed for hydroponics, a commercial tom grower of my acquaintance (now retired due to a stroke) was able to grow in the same soil year after year with no eelworm problems to my knowledge, by using grafted plants. I think he'd been doing the same for 15 years or more.

[Odsox]

I'm not sure about hydroponics either. When you think about it, hydroponic plants are given all the nutrients they need without having to search for them. On the other hand, a bigger root system would provide more nutrients for more fruit .. which is what they claim.
I can foresee another experiment coming on, growing two side by side, one grafted and the other not, and see what the difference is.

I hadn't thought too much about other fruit, although they "do" peppers, chillies, squash, cucumbers and melons. Melons might be another thing to try Mandy, as I don't have too much success with them at all. It's too late to try tomatoes this year, but not melons.

[The Riff-Raff Element]

They certainly seem to be gaining in popularity, as you say. I suppose that if space were limited there might be some merit in having them, but otherwise they just look damn expensive. I have stuck broken tomato plants back together in the past by splinting and binding with twine - it works, so perhaps grafting would be quite easy.

[Odsox]

I've decided to have a stab at grafting melons.
I searched on-line for rootstock seeds but failed miserably, but found that (in Korea anyway) they use quite a variety of squash as rootstock.
So, I have set the 4 remaining seeds from last year's packet to chit, and if all 4 germinate I intend to grow one on it's own roots and I shall attempt to graft the other three to a butternut, a potimarron and a courgette.
It will be interesting whatever happens.