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Old February 8, 2013   #61
aclum
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Hi everyone,

Naysen, thanks for posting the article. I've read it a few times before (along with a number of other article, videos, etc. - often a bit contradictory), but it has more meaning after actually trying some grafts and it was good to re-read it again!

My conclusions are that many of these articles make certain assumptions (or I assume things incorrectly) that are not true in all circumstances or that can be misinterpreted. For example when I first read the article you posted when it said direct sunlight and used the black plastic in their healing chamber, I assumed that it meant basically no exposure to light at all (as opposed to just sunlight). But after Marla's comments and reading the PDF at Johnny's, I realized that artificial lights or diffused sunlight were OK and it was just direct light from the sun that was so bad. When I first posted my problems with grafting on another thread, several people suggested my problem was the complete darkness for 3 days that I had my grafts in.

Also, first time around I was using a technique from a blog from a place called growing together (I posted the link to the blog entry). They mentioned giving the rootstocks a good watering the day before grafting. I did this with my plants and it was not a good thing!! I'm thinking now, that perhaps they had been using a very quick draining potting medium whereas I was using a miracle grow moisture control seed starting mix. So the watering instructions didn't really apply in my case.

And, I was confused by the whole humidity thing. No matter what I did, my guage never went over 80% - even with fogging from a nebulizer plus spraying the sides of the dome and leaving an open container of water in the tray. I read some things on the web saying that an open pan of water inside the closed chamber was enough to maintain 100% humidity, to others saying use a cool mist humidifier. I finally concluded that as long as I has a good deal of condensation on the inside of the dome, things were humid enough.

I believe my failures were principally due to poor water and humidity management and most of my faitures keeled over with wilt fairly quickly after doing the graft.

My first successes came (as I described in an earlier post) came when I started providing the grafting chamber with more light (subdued room light and a mesh shade screen, stopped looking at the plants constantly and opening the cover thus interupting the constant temp and humidity, and cut way back on any misting. As I said, of the 9 plants in this batch, I had 6 survivors. 2 of them subsequently died, but I've got 4 that made it through and are looking good under the lights with my other plants.

The next attempt - using 6 plants - I didn't water the night before, but as I was doing the grafts, the rootstock seemed a bit too dry so I gave each a tiny sip of water. In retrospect, this was a big mistake and all but 2 of my plants wilted in short order. This is exactly what someone earlier mentioned about the problems with too much moisture in the rootstock interfering with the graft. The 2 survivors are in the second chamber now and acclimating to normal conditions.

My lastest trial involved a surplus of very good looking Prue seedlings that I didn't really need (already had my control and back-up plants and the remainder were too large to match with the new rootstock seeds I was starting). I decided to take 4 of them and graft onto them some scions from surplus plants of other varieties. So, just sort of out of curiosity, I grafted them as they were (fairly dry) and just misted the sides of the domes (not the plants themselves) and stuck them in the healing chamber, with just the rubberized mesh shelf liner shading material over the dome and any direct sunlight from the windows blocked off. All 4 survived. They never wilted and after just 2 nights were moved to the second chamber. The second chamber was misted, but now is fairly dry in room light with the vents on the dome to be opened today.

In conclusion, at least in my experience, there are so many variables that one can't always follow the "published instructions" and expect automatic success but has to take their own conditions into account (soil used, location of chamber - greenhouse vs. indoors, etc.) and the major problem as someone stated about is having too much moisture in the plant itself at the time of grafting.

So, that's my experience to date ..... hope it's somewhat helpful.

Anne
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Old February 8, 2013   #62
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Down here most of the time if you want humidity below 75% you have to go inside where it is air conditioned. I attempted grafting of about 20 plants 4 days ago and none of them have wilted over. I spent a lot of time trying to match rootstocks with scions. I had a lot of rootstocks too large to graft to the scions no mater how low the scion was cut, so I left them to get taller and hope I will be able to graft higher up on them. I fear that this will create a problem with the plants wanting to tip over. I had that problem with some of the small rootstock so I figure the
higher up you go the worse that problem will be. Maybe today or tomorrow I will give it a try and see how well it works. The ones that stood up the straightest were the ones grafted lower down on the rootstocks; but that doesn't mean they will end up being the best plants. I grafted a few just an inch above the soil line and I'm thinking there is a good chance that these will send down roots from the scion which I don't want to happen.
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Old February 8, 2013   #63
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Anne, points taken. The specifics of one's environment do bear on the effectiveness of a general set of instructions. Nevertheless, I thought there were some gems of information embedded within the article that at least are worth considering, such as this:
"Grafting should takeplace when there is little water stress upon the plants. Early in the morning or just after dark are excellent times to graft as transpiration has typically slowed to reduced levels."

Now it may be that in my indoor setup with artificial lighting, that whole less water stress in the morning thing just doesn't apply. But at least I have the concept to consider. I think if you have a process that works for you (and you need to prove that to yourself over subsequent trials), well then I envy your success. I'm still groping along to find that process, but I'll keep trying until I get there ... sooner or later, I will.

-naysen
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Old February 8, 2013   #64
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I left 15 of my healing grafted toms out in the wind as yesterdays warm front passed. They were potted up in 4" pots and directly facing 17 - 20 mph warm humid winds all day from the SE. I could have brought them in, I guess it was a morbid fascination to see if they could take it, besides I wanted them exposed to the warm humid air and scattered sunshine.

Anyway, they all came thru, except for one. It is wilting real bad today. The graft looks just fine, and as far as I can tell it hasn't moved. I've kept it out of today's sun, but it is still wilting. I hope it makes it.

All of the ones that were OK were unstaked. They were laying flat in the wind. The one that is wilting today was actually staked in its pot. go figure.

Do you think I'm too hard on my plants?
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Old February 8, 2013   #65
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The way i have been doing my grafts were using a clear transparent tote. Add about a inch or 1/2 inch of water in to the tote and keep the lid on to keep the humidity levels high. I also used a towel warmer as my heat mat to keep the temps around 70-75F. Indoor diffused light doesn't affect the grafted plants like they do in direct sunlight. My initial failures were due to my indoor temps being to cool. I tried side grafting and top grafting. I still don't have it down to a system yet.. out of 25 plants about 5-6 were successful which is a pretty low success rate. I wish i had more tools to accurately measure temps and humidity levels. I also noticed that older plants grafted better than younger ones. Could be because the graft incisions have better contact? I don't know.. Still playing with grafting since i posted my attempts earlier in the Photo Gallery forum.
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Old February 8, 2013   #66
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Hi again everyone,

Naysen, I did really appreciate the your posting the link and, esp for pointing out the part about time of day for watering (which I totally missed on my first reading) as "water and moisture management" seem to be the major cause of my failures! Good luck with your new grafts and keep us updated!

Stvrob - wow! I'm really impressed by your success and how sturdy the grafts are so soon. And thanks for the tip about saving the unused (for the grafts) part of the plants. I cut a couple of carbon scions for grafting and made a point to cut above the cotyledons and save the remainder to see if I can get it to sprout new true leaves.

b54red - Regarding the rootstocks getting too large for the available scions..... seems like it might be fun to grow them out to two or more leaders suitable for grafting a couple of different scions down the road a bit.

Delerium - 5 or 6 keepers out of your 25 first attempts sounds good to me!!! I'm I lost all 18 of my first attempt and high percentages of my subsequent trials. Still hit or miss for me at this stage.

Anne
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Old February 8, 2013   #67
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Things turned around for me after I got a sampling of clips from Graftingclips.com. Before that I was improvising and it wasn't working out well at all.
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Old February 8, 2013   #68
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I'm thinking about grafting a sweet pepper onto a nematode resistant tomato hybrid. Anyone have any thoughts? Or is that over the top?
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Old February 8, 2013   #69
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From my trials - Hybrids work better for root stocks. In my case Brandyboy did better than Big beef. Also Aunt Ruby's german green worked good as a rootstock. I wasn't really going for decease resistance and such.. Was just testing out which rootstocks actually took. There is so many variables - that its hard to figure out what you did wrong. Now that the weather is warming up again - i might try some more grafts.

Some of you mentioned the water stress on newly grafted plants. I was thinking if you used self watering container (bottom watered) you might be able to avoid the water stress and use a dryer medium for the soil (more granular) instead of a potting soil mix.
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Old February 8, 2013   #70
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Stvrob View Post
I'm thinking about grafting a sweet pepper onto a nematode resistant tomato hybrid. Anyone have any thoughts? Or is that over the top?
Seems like it should work
http://legacy.jyi.org/articleimages/...20Capsicum.pdf
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Old February 8, 2013   #71
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Anne, it is too late now to try multiple scions on any of my older rootstock seedlings. This afternoon I used them all. I am thinking that some of them were far too big for the scions I grafted to them; but I went ahead anyway to see how much variance can be allowed and still have them take. Now I just have to wait about a week and see what happens. If the grafts take higher up on the plant then I may try multiple scions on a larger rootstock in a week or two when my second set of seedlings are ready for grafting.

Delerium, I am using Brandy Boy as a scion but could never use it as a rootstock. Brandy Boy has little or no resistance to fusarium. Since the first time I saw it in Burpee's catalogue I have been growing it; but they invariably fall to fusarium before producing more than a couple of tomatoes. I think it is an outstanding tasting tomato so I'm going to try the grafting route and see if I can get one to last a while.
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Old February 8, 2013   #72
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In a few cases I've had rootstock suckers below the healed graft so I've been graftin a second variety on. I now have a few cherokee Purples/brandywine double leaders growing on betterboy roots. This grafting is becoming a lot of fun!
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Old February 9, 2013   #73
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I have a question for some of you that have more experience in grafting. Does it matter if the rootstock is indeterminate or determinate?

Bill
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Old February 9, 2013   #74
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I grafted these three on Tues evening (1/5/13); Maxifort RS, tops: Costuluto Genovese, KBX and Wes.

First day was spent in the dark without interruption.

2nd day in the dark, but I popped the top to let in some fresh air. They needed it as the cotyledons had all began to grow mildew.

3rd day, I let in some indirect, LED light (reflected off back closet wall and into the clear container. Opened lid for 1 min morning and evening.

4th day (today), I'm letting more indirect light in from both the LED and my adjacent fluorescent rig.

The only started wilt like you see in the pics yesterday evening, so perhaps the light came too soon, or was it too late?
-naysen
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Old February 9, 2013   #75
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Naysen, I kept the sides of my box wrapped to keep out side light but allowed indirect light in the top through the clear lid. I got some drooping of a couple when I left the lid off during midday and it was warm so put it back on. Now they are all perky again and I am slowly removing the lid and will leave it off from now on.
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