Quote:
Originally Posted by gdaddybill
Has anyone tried parafilm or Buddy Tape to wrap tomato grafts. These are stretch and wrap materials. A bit wide perhaps but it should be easy to cut while the paper is still attached. Too many wraps might be a problem--it adheres to itself. Great for grafting fruit trees!
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I use Buddy Tape for bud grafting citrus and it is absolutely the best thing for that job. However with both Buddy Tape and Parafilm you need to stretch them quite tightly to get them to stick and the amount of force needed to stretch them would crush the soft tomato stems.
Also these tapes don't provide any support themselves (unless you wrap multiple times around). The beauty of the silicone clips (or bits of tube slit up the length) is that they DO provide mechanical support as long as the stock stem in turgid.
If there were a better way then the industry would use it. Here in New Zealand millions of tomato plants a year are grafted using the silicone clips and in Japan it's billions a year. In North America and most of Europe the clips are available affordably in small quantities and silicone tube is available in all of the developed world (or from China via AliExpress). This is a wheel that doesn't need re-inventing.