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Originally Posted by tvoneicken
Bill, have you tried supernatural? We also found maxifort and estamino to be too vegetative and produce huge plants with too few fruit. Supernatural seems better.
I use the "old style" top-grafting technique and this year things have gone well. The first batch of ~30 grafties turned into ~20 plants that are just going into the ground now (Santa Barbara mountains). That's as much as we have space for and need for. Well, we also planted 8 Celebrities, which have decent resistance to the root knot nematodes that plague most heirlooms here. They're not as tasty for eating fresh but produce lots of great tomato puree (gets frozen and used for cooking).
In terms of grafting size I also find that almost anything can be made to work. I obviously try to match, but sometimes one has to be creative cutting high or cutting low. When I have too spindly a scion I also vary the cut angle. For example, cut the rootstock at 45 degrees and cut the scion at ~70 degrees such that the cut surface area on the scion is about the same size as the cut area on the rootstock, then push it all nicely together in the clip. Works best at high cut angles (very slanted cuts).
With supernatural we end up seeding rootstock and scions at the same time, seems to work out OK. Given the price difference between rootstock and scion seeds we sometimes start some scions a few days early, then more at the same time, then more a few days later. But even if all are seeded at the same time as long as I have 2x the number of scions as rootstock it seems I can make some form of match.
I haven't tried the DE stuff and grow everything in soil blocks. Had a disaster there for the past couple of years trying out coco choir. We'd get seedlings that germinate and grow a bit and then just stall out and look generally unhappy, despite adding liquid fertilizer. Our conclusion is that most likely we were having salinity issues. So this year it has been back to peat moss + pumice + compost. What a difference, the plants just leap out of the blocks!
This year's failure (is there a year where something doesn't fail?) has been to use our own worm compost. We put one seed into each block and 4-5 little plants came up! Obviously seed that was in the compost... The good news is that it's our compost so we know we like the varieties, but still, that's not what we're working for! The second batch used quality store bought potting soil instead of compost and while we didn't have the problem with extra seeds germinating the plants didn't do quite as well. We then bought some compost but we ended up with enough plants already.
One minor issue we struggled with for a while is labeling. Because of using soil blocks it's not very practical to stick a label into the soil. We now get needles with colorful heads and color-code each block by pushing one or multiple needles into the soil block. That seems to work and the needles are reusable after some washing and drying, although they do end up rusting eventually.
I think next year I'm going to try what Delerium showed, which is grafting onto leaves in order to try and make the whole healing thing easier. I have to go back and re-read some of those threads. The whole healing chamber thing is the most nerve wrecking and difficult part in the whole grafting process.
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My success rate was phenomenal when I was using new seedlings. The big problems started when I switched to grafting onto the suckers that had rooted from the earlier grafting. It wasn't so much a size issue because I was able to match most of them up pretty well. I think rather it was more of an issue with the older tougher root stock suckers not bonding with the new seedlings which were nice and tender. Maybe if I could have kept them in the chambers longer but with the damping off problems now that it is hotter what I didn't lose to the graft not taking I lost to damping off on the stem even when I applied some Captan to the stem. I went from 100% to just under 20% success ratio. I feel like for higher success rates this time of the year I will just have to plant more root stock seeds to match my scion seeds.
I am very happy with the RST-04-106-T root stock other than the name. I have had phenomenal results with the grafted plants with the added benefit of resistance to Bacterial Wilt which can be a heart breaker. With TSWV, TYLCV, EB, LB, Gray Mold, spider mites, RKN, 3 races of fusarium wilt, stink bugs, worms it is great to find a root stock that alleviates 3 different problems which are all big problems down here. Another thing is that NE Seeds offers their root stock seed in quantities that are more affordable than most other companies. I buy in lots of 500 seed and end up paying slightly more than a nickel a seed and that gives me enough for over two years of grafting even with a lot of failures. Of course if I drop trying to root the tops of the root stock seedling I will need to use more seed.
Bill