Garden Talk: Specialty Gardens In Small Spaces

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• Technique For Tomato Growers Marries Something Old, Something New

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  Heirloom vegetables have a lot going for them. They have much more variety in flavor and appearance, and their taste hasn’t been engineered away to make them look good after traveling across the country in a truck.

  Unfortunately for the home gardener, they can be trickier to grow because they have also not been developed to withstand challenging conditions. That can spell trouble and disappointment for a home gardener who just wants a delicious tomato at the end of the season.

  Ed Lyon, director of the Allen Centennial Gardens on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, shared a development in the horticulture world that makes heirlooms easier to grow, without sacrificing that great taste: Graft heirloom varieties onto hardier stock.

  “We did it for the first time last year. It’s relatively new, although they’ve been doing it in Japan for years and years,” Lyon said. “One of the issues when we go back to using some of the old heirlooms and the old varieties to get that flavor again is they’re highly susceptible to a lot of diseases.”

  The solution is to graft heirloom varieties onto hardier stock. Lyon said that the majority of grafted vegetable available are tomatoes. The outlet that he purchased from had at least 30 tomato varieties to choose from, but there are also grafted eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, melons and more.

  This development does come with a heftier price tag. Lyon said that he paid between $9 to $12 per plant, which is quite an investment for an annual.

  “I did it with trepidation,” Lyon shared. But garden writer friends assured him that it was the way to go.

  After one season, Lyon said he is convinced that the investment upfront is worth it.

  “I think you’ll buy (fewer) tomato plants as a result,” he said. “Ours turned into absolute bushes. They went into fall totally green, no type of disease issue, yielded enormously, wonderful, flavorful heirlooms.”

  A Google search produces several outlets for heirloom tomato grafts. Lyon ordered from Mighty ‘Mato last year. It was successful enough that he is ordering again for this year.

  Johnny’s Selected seeds has a document available for download that details the process of grafting tomatoes. Johnny’s also provides a how-to grafting video from the University of Vermont Extension.