Our friend Marta Matvienko, experimented with grafted tomatoes. The grafted tomatoes has double the yield of non-grafted tomatoes under the same planting conditions. In some soils, you cannot grow tomatoes at all unless you graft them to a soil disease resistant rootstock!
2 Likes
Just what I need, one more spring chore!. Fortunately, I’ve found plenty of delicious new tomato hybrids that share the flavor of heirlooms but the productivity of newer varieties. I’m coming from the east coast- so different issues than in CA. Early blight is the main one here.
1 Like
Here you will find a discussion on this topic.
If your plant starter source had the likes of Brandy Boy in offering, grafted plants might not be worth the added expense. I haven’t tried grafted, but the new hybrids are as productive as most any new indeterminant variety, with an equal span of season. Country Taste isn’t as tasty as Brandywine but actually continues to bear as late as Sungold with a very nice beefstake type fruit. It is more flavorful than most of the new Betterboy types. Brandyboy and a couple other Brandywine crosses taste as good as the original to me, but are quite productive.
1 Like
Grafted tomatoes are an option rather than a must do. If the variety that you like is performing good at your soil, why would you graft?
Continuously planting tomatoes in the same area of your backyard year after year would lead to yield declines due to build up of soil borne diseases. And if you still want the cultivars that no longer yield as much, it is time to use grafted tomatoes whose rootstocks can tolerate or thrive in the soil.
1 Like
Just sharing real life backyard experimentation using another rootstock.
What works for you may not work for others. Grafting allows for wider adaptability.
I regularly do thousands of tree grafts per season. Tomato grafting is the easiest and fastest graft to do. Can be done in less than a minute for me. Faster than typing this response.
That can be attached to almost all advice posted here- that is why I mentioned my specific pest issue to qualify my advice as well as I could. The question is what are you comparing grafting to. If you aren’t comparing grafted heirlooms to similar tasting modern hybrids you are not addressing my point- leave the poor straw man alone, he needs some rest. It’s good to know the grafting is quick and easy, though, although not as easy as just leaving the plants as they grow.
BrandyBoy is an excellent tomato, widely available. You might look at Mountain Merit, also resistant to Lb and Eb.
I’m agreeing with you, again. 
1 Like
Been there, done that, got the t-shirt for grafting tomatoes. It is useful if growing under conditions where soil disease can build up. For most growers, there is very little benefit. This is because the diseases that cause most problems with tomatoes affect foliage. Grafting does not help very much with foliage disease. If in the SouthEastern U.S. grafting may be beneficial, especially if your soil is infested with nematodes or Ralstonia and if you want to grow heirloom varieties that have little or no resistance to soil borne pests/diseases.
The reason I’ve heard growers do it here is to stimulate better production from Brandywine, but I hadn’t heard the advantage attributed to DR. Maybe I just missed that point- I assumed it was the result of a more vigorous rootstock unrelated to disease.
I bought a Brandywine grafted Tomato because I didn’t grow any BrandyBoys and couldn’t find any for sale this year. This plant is the most vigorous one I have, seems
To have a good amount of tomatoes on it. It will be interesting to see the yield I get.
In trials about 5 years ago at UNC, tomatoes on select naranjilla rootstock outperformed the control group by a longshot against viruses that affect tomatoes in the eastern U.S.
In the same year, trials were performed by UC ANR in California for commercially grown tomatoes. No benefit was found for those tomatoes on naranjilla rootstock. Note: tomatoes do very well here without much intervention.
1 Like