Grafting Tomatoes

Today was an adventure in botany.

In an attempt to beat the looming storm coming from the tornadoes and such down South, we headed out to the fields first thing in the morning with scallions, kohl rabi, and bok choy seedlings to transplant. One whole bed of scallions (planted in bunches of ten), half a bed of bok choy and half a bed of kohl rabi. As interesting as that was, it doesn't compare to what we did next.

After having a light lunch and changing out of our wet clothes (because, of course, it started raining), we packed up a bunch of tomato seedlings and supplies to graft tomatoes in the barn. It was decided that the barn would be the best place to do this because we could control the environment much better than in the greenhouse -- keeping it at a steady temperature with little light and no wind to damage the fragile plants.

It has to be said that I love different plant propagation methods -- rarely do I ever not have a cutting or two rooting in a jar of water somewhere in my home. (That sounded just as dorky in my head before I typed it, but it's true so it stays in the blog!) Needless to say, this was totally up my alley.

The rootstock that we used is called "Maxifort." This tomato variety is solely used for grafting because of its ability to produce a better yield for weaker tomato varieties when grafted together. The varieties that we grafted to the Maxifort were Brandywine, Valencia, Green Zebra, and Purple Cherokee (heirlooms). For a step-by-step instruction on the exact method we used for grafting, check out the video below:

We followed all the steps of this method except for the stringent level of cleanliness used in the video's laboratory setting, which we found impossible to do on a farm...especially since our hands were covered in soil from potting up the tomatoes! We did what we could.