[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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