Roots, both Edible and Incredible

How do you know you are getting a bit behind in garden chores? When the 2014 seed catalogs start arriving and you have not completed cleaning out the garden beds! I was enjoying the newly arrived Pinetree and High Mowing  catalogs when I realized I have not finished my chores with this year’s garden. We already had a garden work day but I spent more time helping put a wood chip border around our deer fence to protect the fragile plastic mesh deer fencing fabric from the town’s mowers than cleaning up my own plot.

 

We always recommend gardeners pull disease-prone plants like tomatoes, peppers, squash and cucumbers and dispose of them in the trash, the task I had yet to finish in my own garden beds. So today I headed to the garden with a black plastic trash bag. My first discovery was a pleasant one. I had left some Golden Ball turnips in the ground after pulling the larger ones and they survived nicely. I now have a nice batch of turnips to use for Thanksgiving dinner.

 

 

Next I pulled all the dead solanaceous and cucurbit plants. The plants were dead brown stems, the leaves long blown away. The biggest distinguishing characteristic was the roots, and how easy or hard it was to pull the plant. Particularly interesting to me was to compare the root structures of the grafted tomato plants to the ungrafted control plant. I have already declared the grafted tomato experiment a failure, and I won’t be planting them next year. Looking at the root balls, you can see why. Below is a photo of the Juliet tomatoes. The ungrafted tomato is the one at the top.

 

 

Alright, maybe I should have removed the fabric from the grafted tomato, but roots are supposed to grow through it and actually did. Also notice the size of the stems. The ungrafted Juliet at the top was grown in a 4 inch pot by a neighbor and was a beautiful transplant with a thick, stocky stem flushed with red. The grafted tomato was a mail order plant and arrived as a small, spindly plant and was never going to compete effectively with my locally grown ungrafted plant. Next I pulled the Big Beef tomatoes, shown below.

 

 

Again, the ungrafted Big Beef is the plant on the top. The Big Beef grafted plant was a bit more successful than the pathetic Juliet grafted plant, but did not compare well to the ungrafted Big Beef. So much for the theory that the rootstock used for grafted tomatoes is far more vigorous and  produces huge root volumes. In my case, that clearly is not true, but there must be a reason. Commercial growers are huge consumers of grafted plants, so it must work in the right conditions. For the time being, I will sit out the grafting experiment and go with ungrafted plants next year.

Bustin’ Their Britches

 

My tomato and pepper plants are still huddling inside under the grow lights where it is warm. They are getting leggy and it is past time they go into the beds, but it is still  too cold. We had the rain they forecast last week, off and on, but even if it wasn’t raining it was grey and ugly. And cold. Saturday daytime temperatures were in the mid-40s all day, and 42F overnight. In New Hampshire and Vermont it snowed last night, heavy in some places! Down South of us they have been having cold weather and even occasional frosts, giving them a little taste of New England gardening. Europe is experiencing similar unseasonably cold weather.

 

I have had the plants outside when I could, when it is sunny with reasonable temperatures and no threats of hail storms. I just can’t see exposing my pepper and eggplant starts to 40F daytime temperatures if I can avoid it. I’m trying to avoid any stunted growth from cold temperatures, since both types of plants are real heat lovers. The tomatoes can take a bit more cold weather, so I am hoping I can get them planted next week, maybe even Monday. Later in the week daytime temperatures are supposed to be in the low 80s so maybe we are seeing a break in this weather. It’s really dependent on the jet stream, which has moved very far south and is sucking in cold air from Canada.

 

The grafted tomato experiment is also shaping up. The grafted plants were potted up into plastic cups and have recovered from their trip to the east coast from California. Unfortunately, they are kind of spindly plants and are starting to get leggy. And I have to keep the graft above soil level to prevent the scion from rooting and negating the disease resistance of the rootstock, so burying them deep is not an option. I acquired a Juliet plant from a neighbor, Jem Mix, who grows organic seedlings and had her annual plant sale Saturday. It is a really stocky, well grown and robust plant (shown below on the right) and is going to be real competition for the grafted plant (on the left). Is the grafted plant up to the challenge, and can it justify its $8 price tag? The Juliet variety is already a robust grower and pretty disease resistant, so will the grafted rootstock add anything?

 

 

 

With the acquisition of the Juliet yesterday, the tomato planting list for this year is now finalized and my precious 14 squares allocated to tomatoes are going to be planted with  the following varieties:

• Sun Gold cherry (2)
• Black Cherry (2)
• Gilbertie paste (1)
• Striped Roman paste (2)
• Juliet (2, 1 grafted)
• Big Beef (2, 1 grafted)
• Cherokee Purple (1 grafted)
• Pineapple (1)
• Green Zebra (1)

Originally I planned on two Gilbertie plants but I had germination problems with it and only one of the plants is really acceptable. The other is a runt and I decided not to give it a coveted spot in the garden. After all, I’m not running a plant hospital here, I’m tying to grow some tomatoes. This is my first year for Gilbertie, but NE gardeners on the Square Foot Gardening forum like it a lot. Seed is hard to find, got mine from High Mowing Seeds. It takes a long growing season to ripen these, with fruits that get seven inches long and weigh 10-12 ounces, so hopefully we have a good tomato summer.

Grafted Tomatoes Arrive

Yesterday the poor UPS guy rattled up my pot-holed driveway and dropped a package. I was not expecting anything, so I was surprised to see it was my order of grafted tomatoes. When I ordered them I chose the latest shipping date, May 15, because tomatoes usually don’t go into the ground here until end of May, so it was a surprise to see them arrive right on the 15th.

 

 

 

They came in a cardboard shipping container with a plastic insert inside. It is designed to hold three tomatoes, which explains why why they have to be ordered in multiples of three. When you open the end of the box and slide out the insert, you see three plants neatly package and identified with little planting markers. You can see I chose a Big Beef, a Juliet and a Cherokee Purple.

 

 

The bottom section of the holder unsnaps and folds away from the root balls. The plants are grown in a fiber sleeve they claim is biodegradable. It looked to me like some kind of spun-bond fiber landscape fabric. It may be biodegradable but you wonder how long does that take? Since I saw a lot of roots growing right through the fiber, I decided not to worry, but I did clip the fabric that extended above the root ball so it wouldn’t wick moisture away.

 

 

The plants were pretty dry and a bit wilted, but not fatally so. I suspect this is done intentionally so they can fold the plants over into the container without snapping a stem. The instructions say to soak in water for 5-10 minutes before planting. Since they can not go outside yet, I put them into 18-ounce solo cups with McEnroe planting mix. I am also keeping them out of direct sun for a few days so they can recover and not get sun scald. They sure look kind of fragile. The white sticks you see were part of the grafting clip that is placed over the joint to hold the scion and rootstock together while the joint knits together.

 

 

 

In a few weeks, my trial of grafted tomatoes will begin. I am going to grow both grafted and un-grafted versions of the Big Beef  and Juliet tomatoes to compare results. I purchased a cell 4-pack of Big Beef and potted them up into solo cups. This should be interesting. Below you can see two of  the contenders, my ungrafted Big Beef on the left and the grafted plant on the right. It is kind of unfair to compare them now since the grafted plant is a little beat up right now. The transplants I bought from Applefield Farm are just beautiful, strong plants. We’ll see if the grafted plant can catch up and exceed.

 

Grafted Tomato plants in your future?

The new 2013 seed catalogs have been arriving and I noticed, for the first time, that some catalogs are offering grafted tomato plants this year. Well, it turns out they have been available to home gardeners in the US for several years now, while they have been extensively used in Europe and Japan, and in US greenhouse agriculture, for years. The concept of grafting is a very old horticultural practice. Roses and fruit trees (members of the Rose family) are routinely grafted onto rootstock because they do not run true from seed. And of course, we all know the European wine industry was saved when an entomologist in Missouri developed a method of grafting Vitis vinifera scions onto phylloxera-resistant American root stock.

 

What is new to me is the concept of grafting non-woody annuals like tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and eggplants. What advantage can be obtained? Grafted tomato plants in the catalogs are priced $8-10 each, so what would make that price worth the benefits? Japan was one of the early adopters of grafted plants, a country where space is at a premium. Then Europe. In the US, greenhouse growers are the economic driver behind grafted plants and the economics are simple. Greenhouses are a large capital investment and have a finite capacity for plants. If the productivity of a given plant could be improved for whatever reasons (vigorousness, soil disease resistance, etc.), say 40-50%, that would be a huge payback for the additional cost of grafted plants. Even for field-grown tomatoes, a significant yield per acre is money in the bank.

 

Do grafted plants have any benefits for the average home gardener? I think that remains to be seen, but the potential is intriguing. A number of benefits are claimed for grafted plants. Among them are increased vigor, extended harvest and disease resistance. Suppose you take a vigorous, disease tolerant rootstock and graft it with a desirable heirloom tomato such as Brandywine. If the grafted plant can produce even 50% more fruit for the one spot I can devote to a Brandywine plant, it would be worth it to me.

Here are some of the claimed benefits of grafting:

More vigorous rootstock that can pump more nutrients into the grafted scion. There are claims that the root mass of the rootstock may be 4-5 times larger than usual. The rootstock is capable of delivering far more nutrients to the scion, yielding more and larger fruit, thus increasing productivity. There is of course an art to pairing rootstock  to scion. Too much vigor and you may overwhelm the scion and  just get rampant vegetative growth. My concern comes from growing in raised beds, where I have constrained volume for each plant, both root mass and foliage. The growers recommend pruning to two leaders to spread the vigor, which was my practice for in-ground plants trained up a pole. In raised beds, I prune to a single leader trained up a trellis cord. At the end of this season I pulled tomato plants with large root systems that consumed their own square plus most of the adjacent square. Do I really want a plant with 4-5 times the root system?

Improved disease resistance, primarily from soil-borne diseases. The root stock varieties are selected for their resistance to some soil-borne diseases and nematodes. For example, Estamino, an organic rootstock bred by Enza Zaden in the Netherlands is grown by King Seeds in the US and retailed by Johnny’s and High Mowing Seeds. Estamino has strong resistance to Verticillium and Fusarium wilts, tomato mosaic virus and leaf mold. It has intermediate resistance to root knot nematodes and tomato spotted wilt virus. The airborne diseases like late and early blight aren’t mentioned, but I have seen blight resistant varieties like Defiant grafted onto rootstock, giving you the best of both. Unfortunately, Defiant is a determinate variety not suited to trellis training. Still, the soil disease resistance is a definite plus for situations like hoop houses, greenhouses and raised beds where there is limited to no opportunity to practice crop rotation. Graft an heirloom with no disease resistance onto rootstock and you get the disease resistance of an hybrid.

Extended production of fruit. The combination of disease resistance with a vigorous rootstock means that plants will keep growing and producing fruit. For a greenhouse with a controlled environment, that is an obvious advantage. If it proves true in the home garden, that would also be a plus. My tomatoes tend to tire out in late summer. This year they only got about 4 feet up a 6 foot trellis. I am no disease expert but I suspect diseases may play a role in this. Usually I am hoping the couple of fruits still on the vine will mature before cold weather. I think that instead, wondering what to do with the bushels of green tomatoes still on the vine would be a pleasant problem to have.

 

\If you want to see how grafting is done (and why retail grafted plants are expensive), there is a great video produced by the University of Vermont here. And just a WARNING: While grafting is not GMO, it is a high-tech process used in agribusiness and Monsanto is heavily involved. The Dutch company De  Ruiter, a Monsanto company, is the source of seed for the Maxifort, Multifort and Beaufort rootstock which are widely used. Seminis has its own rootstock, Cheong Gang. Johnny’s and others do offer rootstock seed not produced by Monsanto but retail growers don’t always volunteer what rootstock they are using. It looks like Log Cabin Plants sold by Territorial in 2011 used Emperador rootstock from Syngenta in the Netherlands, a non-Monsanto product. For 2013, they are using a rootstock branded “SuperNaturals” and it isn’t clear if this is Emperador re-branded or a new rootstock. If you are concerned about avoiding Monsanto products, you should probably ask what rootstock is used.

 

I am definitely intrigued by the concept of grafting tomatoes and will probably try a few plants in 2013. Right now I would have to mail order plants, since I haven’t seen grafted plants at any of the garden centers around here in New England (although Home Depot has trialed selling the Mighty ‘Mato grafted plants, but only online). In the US (outside of the greenhouse industry), most home garden activity seems to have started in the Pacific Northwest, with Log Cabin Plants and retailers like Territorial Seeds. Log Cabin in conjunction with Garden Life developed the Might ‘Mato brand and they seem to be the major grower/promoter for now. Retailers like Home Depot, Territorial, Jung, Totally Tomatoes (and allied Vermont Bean Seed), White Flower Farms, and others are reselling selected Mighty ‘Mato plants. The widest selection seems to be offered by Garden Life itself. Plants will also be available from some garden centers (primarily in western US but hopefully in the NE as well). Expect to pay an average of $8 per plant plus shipping (and usually a 3-plant minimum order). And you probably should order early if you are serious because production is limited.

 

So, do you have any plans to plant grafted tomatoes in 2013? Have you done so before/? I am thinking of trying a grafted Cherokee Purple, because I am such a fan of it and last year was disappointing. Garden Life also offer Paul Robeson, a Russian heirloom that is supposed to be great tasting and early. Then what about Juliet? It is already vigorous and productive, but if I could get 50-100% more fruit from one vine, I only need to plant one of them. I am not ready to try eggplant or pepper yet. I doubt an 8 US$ eggplant is going to be any less susceptible to flea beetle attacks than my 50 cent transplants.