Tomato Grafting and lots of Seed Starting

Exciting news: our first round of tomato grafting is done and the seedlings are healed!  We graft all of the tomatoes we plant in greenhouse/hoophouses because we really like how vigorous, productive and long-lived the plants are.  Grafting involves combining two varieties of tomatoes (one that produces hardy roots and one that produces ideal fruit) by cutting the stems and clipping them together.  Every year, the first round of grafting is challenging because we are a little rusty and the greenhouse is extra cold, but this year seems to be much more successful so far.

We have never had a real healing chamber for grafts and usually end up making something up on the fly.  Grafted tomatoes need moisture and darkness for the healing period and our last-minute sheet-of-plywood-and-cardboard-box arrangement wasn't really setting us up for success... Apparently the answer is putting piece of insulation board under a table, adding a small space heater and covering the whole thing with a tarp.  This is still a little bit “homemade” looking, but it works!

These tomatoes will be planted in the first week of March and will have fruit by early June.  This year, we reduced the number of varieties for this early succession (meaning more unusual colours and patterns are going to wait until later in the season), but we think these plants will last longer in the greenhouse and leave more fruits to go around.

We put together more of our new-to-us seedling tables this week and are very quickly filling them up.  So far they seem like they are much better for seedling health and help keep soil blocks moist for much longer than our old mesh-top tables did.  Hopefully the new tables can give these seedlings an better start so they’ll be as healthy as possible when they (weather permitting) are transplanted into hoophouses in just a few weeks.