 My name is Chip East with the Alabama Cooperative Extension System, and today I'll be talking to you about grafting tomatoes. Why graft tomatoes? There are several reasons to graft tomatoes, but my number one reason is to increase the resistance to soil-borne diseases. For example, grafting a non-disease resistant heirloom onto a hybrid rootstock would be an excellent way to increase disease resistance. Without grafting crop rotation and choosing a disease-resistant cultivar could help as well. You need to select your rootstock seed based on potential problems such as nematodes and fusarium wilt. Those could be avoided from grafting, but other diseases such as early blight and bacterial spot will not. You need to select heirloom varieties based on your market factors. If your heirloom varieties do not make more money, it may be better to grow a disease-resistant hybrid instead. Grafting requires a lot of additional time, and you need to take that into consideration and plan for that. You should construct a healing chamber before the grafting process begins. This chamber should hold the humidity at 80 to 95 percent. The temperature should be between 70 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit. We should exclude light and we can set this up in advance before the grafting process begins. The black plastic over this chamber will exclude light in this example, and it's hard to see but there's water standing in the bottom of this. There's plastic with water in it to keep the humidity high. The hard part of this is keeping the temperature between 70 and 80 degrees. Sanitation is very important when grafting tomatoes. We're grafting to hopefully avoid diseases, so we don't want to spread diseases while we're doing this process. A razor blade has been a good thing to make the cuts with. The only special equipment other than the healing chamber is these and you can get silicone grafting clips, but there are other grafting clips available. The pictures I'm going to show are these silicone grafting clips and they come in different sizes depending on the plant material, which one you would use. What time of day is best for this type grafting is whenever the water stress is lowest, maybe early in the morning or late in the evening. Inside, under a shade, maybe out of the wind. All those are good examples of places to be when grafting tomatoes. The sign or the desirable tomato is cut at a 45 degree angle. The rootstock is cut at a 45 degree angle. Place together and held with a grafting clip. This is just an example. We have it laying down normally. The rootstock would just remain in the pot or cell pack and we would hold our razor blade at an angle to make the cut. Try to do a 45 degree angle as possible, but the stem diameter is the most important thing. The rootstock and the sign need to have the same size stem. You would think we could plant the seeds at the same time and there would always be the same size stem, but sometimes the rootstock might grow faster. So we might have to plant one of the varieties a week or two early than the other. Here you can see an example of the sign held in place to the rootstock with the use of that silicone grafting clip and you can see that 45 degree angle or as close to it as possible. The newly grafted plants will go directly into the healing chamber as soon as possible. For two to four days, exclude light and give them high humidity. If you have to water water under the bottom, do not wet them on top. They look pretty stressed, but after a couple of days they start looking a lot better. After two or three days those grafted plants should start looking a lot better. Then we start introducing them to a little more light. We do this by opening up that healing chamber that would lower the humidity and give them a little light and we just open a little more each day for several days. Don't allow the plants to become stressed, but we do want to start preparing them to go into the field. We can give them more light, but don't put them in the full sun for several days. After about two weeks, the plants would be ready to go into the field and do not bury the grafted union when you plant them. If you bury the grafted union that plant can root out above the graft and become infected by these soil-borne diseases. One potential problem is the plants succoring below the grafted union. Remove those suckers from below the grafted union as soon as you find them. If you have any questions about grafting, grafting tomato plants, you can contact your local extension office or you can call me direct.