Learn the Fresh Earth Farms method for grafting tomato plants, right after these brief messages.
We have added a drop site in Stillwater near Manning Ave just north of Hwy 36. If you have friends or relatives in the area tell them to join the farm! Or if you want to switch to the new drop site let me know as well.
Speaking of joining the farm, it seems the rate of share sales is directly proportional to the desirability of the weather. When we have nice, warm, sunny days we sell a bunch of shares. When the weather turns cold and wet the sales slow down. Don’t let the weather stop you from joining. We are at 85% capacity so the next warm spell could get us close to the end. Join now! And am certainly looking forward to warmer, sunnier days!
We’re still looking for another worker or two. Here is a job description.
We are also still looking for a new drop site location near 3M. Let me know if you are interested in buying a new home and think near 3M would be a great place to live. Or perhaps you already live nearby and could help out. Either way works for me.
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Farm News
Well I did it. I created a bunch of Tomato Frankensteins (Tomatosteins? Frankenmaters?) This week I grafted some tomato plants together to create new tomato plants. I spoke about my plan in a previous newsletter but here now is actual photographic proof of the process. Don’t worry, unlike recent news reports these days, the images you are about to see are not disturbing — unless you are a tomato plant. I used a razor blade to slice off the tops of some of the tomato plants and slammed another sliced top onto its bottom half, thus creating a new plant with one tomato top and another tomato bottom. You can image this would cause great discomfort to a tomato plant. But for us non-tomato-plants let’s take a look at how this process unfolded:
First I had to build a “grafting chamber”. A grafting chamber is a hermetically sealed structure used to let the grafted plants recover from surgery. Well not really hermetically sealed. More like enclosed I guess. Its purpose is to create a humid, warm, dark environment where the plants can focus energy on healing the cut and not in growing the plant. We need to keep it humid so the plants don’t transpire. And we keep it dark so the plants “grow” slowly. I put grow in quotes because we prefer they don’t grow just yet, but like most young children, telling them not to do something will inevitably result in them doing exactly what you asked them not to do, except of course when you try the old reverse psychology on them where they seem to sense you are trying to trick them. Those meddling kids! Anyway, back to the tomatoes.
I built my patent-pending grafting chamber out of the usual raw materials used to create temporary structures: PVC pipe. With four 10 foot sticks and eight three-way connectors — along with the proper number of cuts — the structure was complete. By not gluing the connections I can easily disassemble it and store it until it is needed again next season — as long as I can remember where I store it.
In addition to the structure I needed both clear plastic and black plastic to cover the structure. The clear plastic goes on the structure first and creates the barrier to hold in the humidity. The black plastic goes over the clear plastic and keeps the light out for the first few days while the plants heal.
Once the chamber was complete I set about figuring how to do the grafting. I typically grow tomatoes in 50-cell flats. They call them 50-cell flats because the flat has 50 cells or pots for the plants to grow. I use 50s since they are relatively large and give the tomato plant plenty of room to grow prior to planting out. But, since half the tomatoes I am grafting — the tops or scions — will not continue to grow in the flats there is no need to plant them in such large cells. So for the scions I planted them in 72-cell flats. The rootstock — the bottom of our Frankenmater — I planted in 50s since they will continue to grow there until planted out in the hoop house.
Typically from the videos of grafting I reviewed, the grafter takes a rootstock and a scion plant out of the flat and proceeds to do the surgery. I tried that but with the plants being so small at this stage I could not extract the rootstock out of the flat without losing a lot of the root ball. The roots hadn’t filled in the whole cell yet. This made for a lot of finger dexterity working around all the plants within the flat. But after awhile I got pretty good at it.
The main trick in doing the grafting is to get the stems of the rootstock and the scion to be the exact same size. Now I don’t think I accomplished the ideal but as they say, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. My technique was to cut the rootstock at precisely a 60 degree angle just below the cotyledons — the small, differently-shaped first leaves of a just emerged plant. Why below you ask? If we cut the rootstock above the cotyledons the rootstock could generate new branches of the rootstock variety, which we don’t want since the fruit from the rootstocks are not desirable.
Once I had the top of the rootstock cut off I would use the top to find a similar size scion plant and using my highly sensitive sense of touch, figure out where on the stem the two plant tops were about the size diameter. Using touch is better than eyesight especially in someone advanced in age such as myself. Plus as we all should know, fingers are highly sensitive. We can determine the difference between one and two pages of a books. That’s pretty sensitive!
Once I found the right spot on the right scion plant I would cut the stem at exactly 60 degrees. Ok, maybe not exactly 60 degrees on the stem cuts but after a while I got pretty consistent in getting the angles pretty equal. Now here is the most important part — throw away the rootstock top! Do this quickly so that you don’t get confused. Tomato tops at this stage are really hard to tell apart so having two tomato tops in your hands can get confusing. It would be a shame to go through all this work just to graft the original top back onto the rootstock!
The next step is to trim away some of the leaves of the scion. With less leaf surface there will be less transpiration and a greater likelihood of success — or so my theory goes. After trimming I grab the appropriate size grafting clip to fit over the rootstock. I purchased three different size clips and it is surprising how small the difference in size is yet how having the wrong size won’t fit at all. Using the right size clip, I slip it over the rootstock then insert the scion into the top of the clip making sure to align the top and bottom so the cuts align properly. Since the clips are translucent it is reasonably easy to see when the cuts are aligned. Plus the steep angle of the cut makes the alignment a bit easier. Once the two parts are in contact I put a small stick through the tubular hole on the side of the clip to hold the plant in the upright and locked position. This not only helps the plants heal better but also prevented me from disturbing the previously grafted plants while grafting the later grafted plants.
Once all the plants in a given flat were grafted I placed the tray into the grafting curing chamber. I should also mention that I misted the sides of the chamber to increase the humidity in the chamber. Why not mist the plants you ask? Wouldn’t that slow down the transpiration? It would, but it would also increase the likelihood of disease and put additional stress on the graft union. Misting the sides should provide plenty of humidity.
Once all the trays were complete and in the chamber I closed up the clear plastic front panel and covered the whole chamber with the black plastic. The plants have been in the chamber for about one day at the time of this writing and so far they look pretty good. They will stay in the chamber for about one week. I’ll gradually introduce light and less humidity over the course of the week to get them acclimated to going back into the greenhouse to grow to transplant size. Hopefully this will result in a bunch of healthy, happy plants.
My next experiment is to create a true Frankenfood by grafting the ears of corn and the eyes of a potato onto a head of lettuce!
That’s more than enough words for one newsletter. As always, feel free to contact me with any questions, comments, suggestions, thoughts, jokes, brain teasers or if you just need to test out your new email address.
