Tomato Grafting

After much hacking and slashing.


After some furtling.


More furtling and strung up so that you can see...






Even more furtling.


Yet more furtling.


The total harvest.

 

It doesn't feel satisfying unless you've got a glut so here's hoping that you're up to your eyeballs with them both.

 

Sadly, I will not be doing any tomato grafting this year because of ...



.

 

Er, misterQ:

 

Ahem, I will be doing and have done some grafting this year.





I have dispensed with the use of healing chambers as I found them to be quite cumbersome and took up too much valuable space.

Of course, this meant employing grafting techniques which don't require ultra careful control of heat, humidity and lighting conditions during the healing process.


I am still pursuing the elusive three veg on one plant so to that endeavour I have grafted:

Five Peptomtatoes (bell pepper + Morrisons "Grape" tomato + white potato);
Three Tomtatogines (Gigantomo "beef" tomato + white potato + aubergine).


The potato portion of the graft (pictured above) were done using the approach or inarching graft. The grafting point being bound together using strips of clingfilm and sellotape.

This is an experimental graft so am unsure of the success rate.


The top part of the grafts are more reliable.

Bell pepper


Aubergine



Effectively, they are cleft grafts done at the leaf nodes of the tomato vine.


The grafts were done on Saturday 25th April, and so far they have not died.

 

30th May 2020 - Seven days after transplanting.




Four peptomtatoes made it to the transplanting stage but after the first five days, I noticed that one did not settle in properly so planted a plain tomato seedling next to it in order to make use of the vacant space should it not survive.

Seven days after transplanting, I also noticed rootstock rot in another peptomtato.

 

2nd July 2020 - Now, down to two peptomtatoes.






Notice the potato suckers? These were snipped off until the fourth truss had set fruit. After that, you can either let them grow or continue to snip them off.

 

20th August 2020 - Just one peptomtato remaining, the other relegated to a tomtato.






Potato part - check, tomato part - check, pepper part - very slow.

Dammit!

It looks like I won't get the triple in time. I was so looking forward to roast peppers with chips and ketchup.

 

6th September 2020 - Very, very slow.

 

17th September 2020 - Settling for egg, chips and ketchup instead.






aka Tomtatogines.

Haha!

 

17th September 2020 - Or, just egg with ketchup.




aka Tomogine.

 

Frankenstein comes to mind.

 

Ok, it's time to show what's down below.

 

About a week after chopping off the tomato tops.









The big aubergine was from the Tomogine.

From the results, I can safely conclude that triple grafts, although doable, will need a longer spell of warm weather, perhaps another sixty days, to produce bumper crops.