Tomato Grafting

Very sad to report that in my effort to pack 3 square metres of plants onto 3 windowsills which could only support about half of that amount, the tomatoes, which grew top heavy, fell like dominoes onto the floor.

This wiped out my A-Team of Tumbling Tom/Picasso grafts and all but one Tumbling Tom/Indigo Rose grafts.

So, I had no choice but to plant my B-Team grafts today (these were grafted about two weeks after the first batch).






Unfortunately, I did not have enough viable Indigo Rose rootstocks to do a second batch.






As noted from last year - bush-type tomato plants will sprawl onto the soil and form roots if they are not supported. So, ...

 

Grafted tomatos for me.....third year now. Large crops, healthy and robust foliage. Currently, fruit is forming on some.

 

I very much appreciate the sympathy.

I rarely turn on the central heating and I don't run any electric heaters so the grafts did take longer to fuse together resulting in weaker plants than they ought to be, so next year I plan on taking better control of the temperature and the humidity.

By coincidence, a local resident has kindly donated a brand new 2KW fan heater. I called out to the universe and the universe seemed to have answered back!

 

No time to cry over spilt milk - pressing on with the planting.






Three of the four are Indigo Rose/Osprey tomtato grafts.

 

Some progress with the Tumbling Tom/Picasso grafts.


The central plant.



There are also signs of life with the Indigo Rose/Osprey grafts.

 

A few days after the downpour.



The potato shoots will be cut back to soil level whilst the tomatoes are still forming.



Preserve the leader, preserve the leader.



Bu99er! Something or someone must have snapped the lead shoot.



But, there is fruit.



To fix the damaged plant, I will need to wait for a sucker shoot to form and then train that up as the new leader.

 

Growing Orange Paruche, Sweet Petite, GD and Shirley.....all grafted and all producing. O Paruche the earliest and have had a dozen fruits so far.
Agree with JWK about the vigour and disease resistance.
Mister Q, did you graft your own? This is something I want to do too

 

Indeed I did graft my own.

Please do have a go and join us.

If you do then I would recommend that you invest in some good quality grafting clips like the ones others are using. My own clips are the cheap ebay copies which do not have a consistent clamping grip due to their poor manufacturing so are not recommended.

 

Good to know.

What are their minimum and maximum diameter clamp sizes?

 

Some time later.


Sacrificed a developing truss to encourage a new leader.

 

Blooms and fruit setting on the Tumbling Toms.


The first ripened fruit appears on the single Tumbling Tom/Indigo Rose grafted plant.

 

Something strange about the Tumbling Tom/Picasso TomTato grafted plants.



The scions appear to be exhibiting the growth characteristics of a vine type (indeterminate) tomato despite the seedlings having been taken from the same pot as the Tumbling Toms that are growing next to them.

This either means that I've mislabelled the scions or that some of the seeds were a result of cross pollination, or that the potato rootstocks themselves are conferring this strange property to the scions.

In any case, I am expecting to get about six trusses on each plant so I am letting them grow unrestrained without pruning for the time being.