[Market-farming] Early Blight in Tomatoes and grafting tomatoes
Marlin Burkholder
glenecofarm at planetcomm.net
Sun May 10 21:54:25 EDT 2009
Has anyone tried JSS's JTO-99197 tomato? The first I have seen advertised
as resistent to early blight. I have used and liked in the past Red Sun but
they have been the first to succomb to early blight, even before most of my
heirloon varieties. Now that the seed supply for Red Sun seems to have
dried up, I decided to order the JTO strain and attempt to graft some of my
remaining Red Sun onto JTO rootstock. I had some illness the week the
plants were getting big enough to graft and before I could get to it the
stems had gotten too thick to accept my grafting clips.
Now I have a bunch of JTOs in addition to Red Suns that I have just planted
out. Johnneys has good things to say about the size and marketability of
the fruit but average about the flavor. I guess I am going to find out how
the two will compare for flavor and blight resistence.
Oh I did have a partial success later on with grafting some heirloom
varieties onto Beaufort rootstock. One flat has less than 25% takes and the
other has about 40-50% takes. I saved the rootstocks from my scion plants
and they are growing out some weak sideshoots. Also the Beaufort rootstocks
on the failed grafts are sending up shoots so I am thinking of collecting
some of the suckers soon to come and any other scion material I can recover
and play around a little more with grafting onto the remaining Beaufort
stocks just to practice the technique a little more.
I hope to be able to write up what I learn on my blog
www.gleneco.blogspot.com eventually.
Marlin Burkholder
Virginia
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