I figure my cost of producing grafted plants comes in somewhere between .40 and .50 per finished grafted plant. The reason for the cheap price is I reuse everything and heirloom seeds cost me virtually nothing. I may get anywhere from two to four grafts from one root stock seed over the entire grafting season which for me starts in late January even though seed are started in December. I bought 500 root stock seed and haven't used but about 100. So far this year I have produced around 300 grafted plants. Even using a root stock seed per plant the cost per graft with overall success rate would still be not much over 50 or 60 cents apiece. Of course the cost would go up considerably maybe as much as a dollar a finished graft if my success rate was as low as it is right now in the summer heat.
I went from nearly 100% success rate the first of the grafting season down to between 25% to 40% depending on the weather and using suckered root stock. Using suckered root stock made from suckering the tops cut off the first root stock seedlings really drops my success rate once they get tall and I have to graft onto old tougher stems. The biggest cost is the root stock seed price and buying in bulk makes that reasonable once you get your success rate up. Buying root stock seed in very small amounts and paying the shipping on them can get pretty pricey. I do run the risk of the bulk seeds going bad and having poor germination before I use them all which could raise my cost some. The second biggest cost is the large grain DE which I use for the healing process. I now reuse a great deal of that and it has helped cut my cost. I also reuse most of my grafting clips two or three times at least.
When I first started and was buying lots of new stuff like clips, healing chambers, DE, root stock seed in small amounts, and cups my cost was closer to two or three dollars per finished grafted plant. Part of that was due to a much lower success rate than I now average and part was not reusing things like DE and grafting clips. The fact that I was setting out between 70 and 100 plants over the course of the entire long season we have also reduced my cost per plant. Once you get good at grafting and have all the stuff needed and reuse most of it the cost goes down considerably.
Bill
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