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Old March 3, 2018   #18
b54red
Tomatovillian™
 
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Join Date: Sep 2009
Location: Alabama
Posts: 7,068
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Originally Posted by Gardeneer View Post
Hi ,Bill. Good luck and thanks for sharing.
Me, did not , am not attempting to graft, mostly due to lack of resurces. Also my last year,s grow results were free of any root borne problems.
I,ve started my seeds 1rst of Feb. They are doing fine under light. 3 to 4 more weeks untill plant out time. In 2 to 3 weeks I will srart hardening off. At night they will sleep in the garage.
Congratulations on having soil that isn't burdened with soil born illnesses. Maybe you are far enough north to avoid those problems in your garden. They sure do complicate the growing of several crops.

I enjoy the grafting process but I would certainly not go to all that trouble if I didn't have severe soil born diseases. It is a lot of work and as far as I can see only a few varieties actually do much better as a result of being grafted. I am grafting a few varieties I haven't grown for years like Kosovo, Grub's Mystery Green, Fish Lake Oxheart, and Omar's Lebanese. I'm not a fan of the taste and texture of Omar's Lebanese but I have never grafted it and would like to see if a the grafted plant still can produce those montrous tomatoes that I used to get from it.

It looked like perfect weather to plant out last week and it may have been safe to do so but I kept watch on my tulip poplar and it hadn't opened up at all so I waited even though days were in the upper 70s to mid 80s and nights in the 60s and 70s. It suddenly dropped into the low 40s last night and the prediction is for low to mid 30s by late in the week. Even if we don't get a bad frost or a freeze the cold nights would retard the growth of tomatoes set out that early. Besides I like to harden my grafted plants off for longer before setting them out in the spring winds.

I now have three batches of grafts hardening off and four batches in the healing chambers as of a few minutes ago when I finished grafting my latest batch. If I don't have major failures of my last few batches I will have a lot of extra grafted plants this spring. I am going to set out more plants than normal this spring due to the total loss of my late summer and fall tomatoes to TYLCV last season. I hope the hard freezes killed off the whiteflies that brought that new blight up to us last year because I sure miss those good home grown tomatoes in the fall.

Bill
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