When I first heard of grated tomatoes, I thought it was a marketing ploy.  Why graft a plant that only lives one season then dies?  It turns out, though, that grafted tomatoes address real problems that market farmers have.  Since these tomatoes are now finding their way into the consumer market, I will discuss why they are being produced in this post.  The next post will discuss how they are grafted.

Lots Of Tomato Diseases

Tomato growers battle a range of diseases to grow the tomatoes we eat.  Grafting helps combat verticillium wilt, fusarium wilt, corky root rot, root-knot nematodes, bacterial wilt, tomato mosaic virus, and tomato spotted wilt virus.  Research is ongoing about the ability of grafted tomatoes to withstand early blight, late blight, and blossom-end rot.

Even the best sanitation in the world cannot keep all these diseases at bay when a farmer uses the same field year after year.  Since farmers only have a limited amount of land, they have to use it whether they have these problems there or not.

Outproduce Regular Tomatoes

The University of Ohio is studying grafted tomatoes.  So far, they outproduce regular tomatoes.  Why?  The rootstock is usually a variety that is very disease resistant.  Unfortunately, the tomatoes it produces are pretty nasty.  But when good-tasting tomatoes are grafted on the rootstock, you get a disease-resistant plant that produces good tomatoes.  This is being touted as a way to revive some heirloom tomatoes that have trouble resisting disease but taste good.  They also add to the genetic diversity of the tomato crop.

Grafting Is Old

Grafting has been used for centuries for fruit trees.  Asian vegetable growers began using it in the 1920s to combat a range of diseases.  They grafted watermelons onto gourds or squash rootstock.  This was such a success that today 81% of Korean vegetables and 54% of Japanese vegetables are produced on grafted plants.  Several countries in Europe also graft vegetables.

Territorial Seed Company was the first place to sell grafted tomatoes to the public.   The company that supplies them with the tomatoes, Log House Plants, has a very thorough discussion of grafted tomatoes and links to research on them.  It also lists the companies Log House Plants supply with grafted vegetables.

Want to learn to garden? My first attempt at gardening ended up in failure. The weeds took over and squeezed the vegetables out. I was very frustrated by this waste of good seed, time, and money. So I became a master gardener and spent a lot of time helping other people avoid or overcome problems in their garden. 

In order to help others garden successfully, I have written a book, Vegetable Gardening from the Ground Up, available in an ebook or a paperback from Amazon. It is also in Kindle Unlimited.