Last week, I had a rare chance to sip a cup with Sheila at our favorite coffee shop. We discussed some fundraising ideas for the Community Garden, and I thought the conversation had moved on to more general gardening topics. Apparently I was wrong.
"What do you think of graft in tomatoes?" Sheila asked.
"I'm not sure just how much we could raise," I said. "I don't have any numbers, but I doubt it's more than a dollar a pound."
"According to the Johnny's Selected Seeds table, depending upon variety, you can raise as much as twelve pounds more per plant," Sheila said.
"I'm thinking of the legal and moral issues." I said. "We need to be transparent."
"Grafting is perfectly legal," Sheila said. "They've been doing it to apples for a long time. And yes, we'd eventually have to transplant them in the garden."
Before I lost faith in the pristine nature of my favorite fruit, Sheila reminded me that grafting is simply putting the tasty plant variety, apple or tomato or whatever, on tough rootstock.
Heirloom tomatoes are almost always much tastier than modern hybrids. Unfortunately, they also tend to be less productive and less disease resistant. They are notoriously slow to set fruit, and in Northern Nevada's short growing season, that is a problem.
If you graft that tasty top on rootstock that can resist disease and gather nutrition for the plant more efficiently, the result can be a combination of taste and productivity.
A quick look at my seed catalogs shows that grafted tomatoes are widely available this year. They will cost eight dollars or more per plant, double what the typical tomato costs at the big box store. Fortunately, there are cheaper options. You can buy sprouted tomatoes strictly as rootstock, or you can start both your heirloom variety and your rootstock from seed. The Internet has instructional videos, if you're interested.
I once had a volunteer tomato grow between some rocks. The soil wasn't fertile, and the watering wasn't regular. My little volunteer survived a fairly hard frost, then produced earlier and more heavily than any other tomato I've ever grown. Before I could think of a name for the tomato variety that I was sure would rocket me to fame, the first tomato ripened.
I tasted it. Or rather, I didn't taste it. There was no flavor, no flavor at all.
I wish I had saved some seeds, because that would have been some fine rootstock.
I may not be alone in this, but I count the success of any year's garden by how my tomatoes do. I've evolved an elaborate tomato strategy.
I usually plant many kinds of tomatoes, and between twenty or thirty tomato plants, with a goal of canning at least a hundred pints of tomatoes.
I usually start two or three kinds of tomatoes from seed, choosing varieties I think will taste good and perform well for me. Sometimes they do, but often they don't.
I buy or beg tomato plants from people I know, and then I buy a few from stores.
Usually, I get eighty percent of my tomatoes from about twenty percent of my plants. They are usually not the tastiest tomatoes.
This year, my tomato strategy will include graft. If I can halve the number of tomatoes I plant, I'll halve the amount of time I spend in my least favorite garden chore-filling Wall-O-Waters. I'll save room in my garden.
I don't see how I can lose, as long as I don't get arrested for graft.
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When Teresa Howell is not cooking up illegal tomato schemes, she teaches English at Great Basin College.
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