Vegetable Grafting: What is it, Why do it ?

When I first heard of 'grafting' as it relates to agriculture, my initial reaction was the very antithesis of joy and excitement. A conglomerate of trig functions, standard deviation and x-y graphs drowned out all joy and pleasure of my newly discovered agriculture-companion. Thankfully, and to my own personal delight grafting is far from number crunching (no offense to any accounting or mechanical/electrical engineer majors).
Grafting is a horticultural technique that dates back as far as the 5th century A.D. and is now used commercially world-wide.  In short, the objective is to avoid soil-borne diseases such as Fusarium wilt in cucurbitaceae and bacterial wilt in solanaceae (http://fftc.imita.org). Other benefits include acquired tolerance to abiotic stresses such as chilling or salt stresses, higher vigor and higher yield.
There are many ways to go about grafting a plant (of which we'll not delve into in this blog, as I myself am only just scathing the surface). Basically to graft a plant, take and cut the rootstock of one plant variety and mend it to the scion of a preferred variety.

Last week in class we had the opportunity to try our luck grafting a few tomato transplants. To borrow a trite expression, "I'm batting 500". Out of the two transplants I attempted to graft, one successfully took and the other, well he will be a great addition to naturally composted fertilizer…