Grafted vegetables are the latest innovation to assist the vegetable grower – both professional growers and the home gardener.
Dobies have just started to sell grafted vegetables – click this link to see the Dobies page for grafted veg.
Grafting vegetables has been going on for centuries, and was described in a seventeenth century book in Korea. The grafting operation is time consuming, but the development of robots has speeded things up. Also the ability to improve the healing process around the graft has increased survival rates. These two facts, mean that grafting vegetables is now commercially viable. In the year 2000, 700 million grafted vegetable plants were used in Japan and Korea. In Japan almost 95 % of the watermelons, oriental melons, greenhouse cucumbers, tomato and eggplant crops are grafted before being transplanted to the field or greenhouse.
- picked-tomatoes
Grafting is well suited for vegetable plants which produce fruits, such as tomatoes, cucumbers and melons.
- female-cucumber-flower
Grafting is a method of propagation which fuses the tissue of two plants together. The rootstock, which provides the roots and support, is joined up with top end of another plant which grows stems, leaves, flowers, and fruits.
The main reason for grafting is to avoid soil-borne diseases such as Fusarium Wilt and Bacterial Wilt. The rootstock used is tolerant to these wilt diseases, and also very vigorous.
Therefore grafted vegetables :
- Tend to be more vigorous, producing larger plants
- Have greater resistance to pests and diseases
- Have less susceptibility to nutritional disorders
- Perform well with less or no heat in the greenhouse
- Get an early start, as they will be well grown & vigorous when conditions are suitable for planting out
- Will have a longer growing season
- Yield top quality fruit over a longer period compared to normal plants
Grafted vegetables offer gardeners with little space the chance to grow something different, because two different varieties can be grafted onto one rootstock.
Grafted vegetables are an exciting development, offering great potential for the vegetable gardener.
