 Everyone, welcome to the afternoon sessions of the Farmers' Forum. My name is David Trinklein. I'm on the faculty of the Plant Sciences University of Missouri. It's my pleasure to moderate the first three hours' worth of sessions. To begin with, I would like to introduce my colleague, Dr. Sanjian Gu, who is a vegetable extension specialist as well as a faculty member at Lincoln University in Jefferson City. Before Dr. Gu arrived in Missouri, I don't think many Missourians at least heard of the concept of vegetable grafting, much less tomato grafting. Since his arrival, it's been kind of a standard best management practice. And today he's going to give us an update on some of the research he's been carried out in grafting. Dr. Gu. Thank you, Dave. I give one presentation before, I mean this morning for the seminar. This morning I talked about, hold on, let me move to the other one. You can see the outline over there, this is for today, whole day. So this morning I talked about the introduction part, what, why, and then we talked about how. And this afternoon I'm going to talk about my research at Lincoln University. Before we start, for those who were not able to make my presentation, I do have a hand out, which is actually a newsletter, articles. And my two assistants, Sean and Katherine, are going to distribute them to you, there should be two, there should be three articles, but I'm still working on the third one. So the first one is introduction about vegetable grafting. The second one is about tomato grafting. This morning I discussed in detail about how to do grafting in general, not only for tomatoes, but also for pepper, for eggplants, for watermelon, cucumber, and cucumber-based stuff. So if you are interested in my presentation, send me emails so I can send you a PDF version. So just give you a pre-warning, this afternoon's talk will be my research update and it will be really dry. So you'll see a lot of figures in the graphics stuff, so it's not going to be so colorful with pictures like this morning. And also, I wasn't able to get all the data analyzed for this year. We made some mistake there by not including the controls. So the result will be primarily from last year. But you'll find what we did last year. How many of you have attended my seminar this morning? Okay, so how many of you think you are very confident with grafting part already? One hand, two hands, three hands, pretty good. So like I said, today, this afternoon will be a research update. I will not give you a lot of information about the general grafting technology stuff. It will be just some research, okay? Again, my name is Sanjun, and Sanjun Gu, I'm always at Lincoln University Extension. I have been in Missouri for almost five years now. Time just passes fast. Okay, what we did last year, we did two research projects. Number one is the grafting compatibility study with heirloom tomatoes, because we now introduced the idea to our farmers about tomato grafting. They always ask me questions, whether, you know, if I have heirloom, can I just go try them? You know, do you have any research data to see what they're going to take? Because you put two things together, there's a good chance they will not take. So that's the reason behind this research. Of course, people are interested in high tunnel or filled heirloom tomato production, especially for organic or for farmer's markets. So that's why I did this research. And for those of you who don't really know about grafting yet, I can tell you some advantage. Number one, you'll have disease, especially soil-borne disease resistance, because of the rootstock. And number two, if you choose a good rootstock, you usually have enhanced vigor, and your yield usually be enhanced, you'll be increased. And also, high tunnel has been getting popular, and we use high tunnel for season extension, especially in early fall or early spring or later spring. So we want to catch maybe two more months time to produce more warm seeding vegetables, as well as some of the cold seeding vegetables. So grafting with correct rootstock, you do enhance your scion-coated hardness. So just some background information for you. Okay, for this research, what we did, this is just an introduction part. We don't have to go through this again. What we did last year, we chose about 21 heirloom tomatoes, and we grafted them on two rootstocks, Billfort and Maxifort. So we used the tubing grafting method. We tried all those heirloom tomatoes. You can see some of them, like a Kentucky beef steak, brandy wine, pink heart. I like this one, actually. So what we did briefly, we used the tubing method. This shows you how you do it. And for those of you who went to my talk this morning, it should look familiar. This picture was from, those pictures were from Dr. Revert from Kansas State University. And basically what you do, you grow your rootstock and your scion similar size. You cut your rootstock either before or up below or over the cutting landings. I prefer this one because later you don't have to remove suckers. And put a tube on it. This is called a tube grafting method because the tubes were designed specifically for this method. And you slide this tube in and then you cut your scion, different angle, 45 degree. And you slide this in, make sure the two surfaces contact each other. And that'll be it. Of course, later you have to move it into your growth chamber to heal them. So basically for this acclimation process, for day one to three, you keep to close to 100% darkness and close to 100% humidity. And after three days, you slowly reduce the darkness and keep relatively high humidity. And then after seven to 10 days, they are as normal if they take. One lesson I learned from this year was the temperature, even though it's not listed here, the temperature plays very important role in the survival. I guess you don't want to keep your temperature before 80 degree Fahrenheit. And room temperature will be actually very nice. The story for my observation was before a meeting, I grafted something for some kids and I just dropped them in my office. And then I came back 70 days later, they all survived without any cover. So that gave me the hint that the temperature is very critical. My office temperature in summertime is about 70 degree or lower. So they survived really well. And the humidity maybe is less than 50. So keep that in mind. Okay, we did the greenhouse research. This is my growth chamber. We did just build some frame and cover with some plastic. That's it. I do have a household. She really the fire inside. This is just to show you the picture of the grafted transplant. And those are survived transplants. So those greenhouse study, I grafted them to see the survival, whether they are successful or not. So here's the result. Like I said, it's all graphic stuff. And this is my heirloom variety. And this is my survival rate. Rate with one is 100%. So this is on Buford, the roof stock Buford. You can see the lowest one is branding one red. It's actually not too bad, 80%. By the way, I grafted all this by myself. It took me a lot of time. So most of them close to 100% take. So it was really, really good. And for Maxiford, however, I did see some difference. And you can see this mortgage lifter. And I don't even know how to read it. The H55, they were particularly low. I tried to find out why it was this low. I guess I probably was just too tired. I don't know. So however, if you see the statistics, you see even those 80% on Buford survival and the 72% on Maxiford by the statistics analysis, they are not significantly different. So even though there are some exceptions there, we will see in general, there was not, at least in the greenhouse setting, incompatibility issue. So which means you can graft them. They can take really well. And they can grow. And then, whether they're going to be OK in the field or not, we don't know. Because earlier, just like the grips, you graft them. They look really well. You plant them. Some of them, they will die or slowly reduce the vigor after 10, 15 years. So we did the greenhouse study just to see whether grafting is successful or not. And then we planted them in the field to test them in the real environment, especially in the open field. And last year was a good year to test because it was hot and dry. So we planted those successfully-survived graphite transplants in the field. This is how we did it. In open field, it was really dry. And we measured the growth in yield. Yield data is not available yet, I believe, because last year, we just didn't have tomatoes. And later in the growing season, and when the weather was cold, and we harvested a lot of green tomatoes, not red ones. So we measured the stem diameter. And then we measured the stem diameter above and below the grafted union, trying to find an index to measure the compatibility. So here's one picture showing this brand new wine pink grafting on Buford. You can see the rows. And here is the grafted union. Here is the grafted union. Here is the grafted union. And some of the plants, we actually planted a little bit too deep. However, you don't see a lot of rows growing out above the grafted union, which was OK. We don't want any rows come out from the sion part, OK? I split this, this is the grafted union. And you see the picture here. You do see kind of a diagonal line here showing the grafted union, but even though it's here, it's showing this. So this one is non-grafted. You see visually, you don't see a lot of difference, which means they do really well. If you see the connection here, this is the sion. This is your rootstock. There's no obvious stop there, even though you can see something there. So I draw a line there just to show the grafted union there. And for stem diameter, we always tell people that if by choosing the good rootstock, your sion growth rigor can be enhanced. So we measure the stem diameter. You can see on Buford or Maxiford, all those stems were bigger than the non-grafted control. So that shows the difference on the thickness of your stem. That's one way to see you have enhanced the vigor. Then for the diameter ratio above and below, of course, non-grafted would be 0. I mean, it would be 1. And for Buford and Maxiford, the grafted union actually did something to the plant. So above the grafted union, it's a little bit thicker than the lower one. Even though visually, by your bare eyes, you don't see the difference, if you measure them with the caliber, you actually see the difference. So we do see some difference over there. And the conclusion here is, well, this is about the greenhouse trial. We had a better luck with Maxiford than Buford. And then we know, I just said that, we had bigger or thicker stems for the grafted ones. So the most important conclusion for this part is grafting compatibility seemed not to be an issue. So at least in the tested 21 varieties. So if you have an heirloom tomato, I'm thinking I'm about maybe 90% sure you will not have incompatibility for tomatoes. The reason incompatibility is so important, just because if you think about it, you do graft watermelon or cucumber or melon. If you add some bitterness to your watermelon, I don't think people will like it. But for tomatoes, I don't think it's a big challenge. So then again, that year, we did some heirloom trial with grafting in the high tunnels. And I have two high tunnels. One is double-year poly. The other one is single-year poly. So we did some research on that. And what we want to do to find out if grafting will enhance the heirloom tomato production in high tunnels. Number two, to find out whether a single-year versus double-year poly will do something to the heirloom tomatoes, especially grafting ones in the high tunnels. And I placed one sentence here. Tomato grafting in the high tunnel could be a perfect combination. The reason behind that, people started to do high tunnels largely because the ARCS got involved. They got involved with the cost-share program. So we have seen a lot high tunnels everywhere almost in the Midwest. So when people try to use new high tunnels, they don't have a list that they don't maybe just beginners like, I don't know. But their soil is kind of new. They don't have a lot of soil-borne disease problems. But in the future, since high tunnel is a little bit costly to build, to maintain, and you give you more money, so you tend to produce more of your cash crop like tomatoes. And the rotation is limited in the high tunnel. And you want to apply more manures or compost. So sooner or later, your soil disease will build up. Your soil salinity may build up if you're not careful enough. So by doing that, you cause a lot of trouble for your production. And then, and you cannot use methyl bromide anymore because it's banned for its environment to damage. So you cannot use fumigant to do that. The new one may not be as well as the one we used before, like methyl bromide, or they may have some environmental issues as well. Or simply because you are organic or a natural farmer, you don't want to do anything with that. So by doing high tunnel, but adapting the grafting technology, you can avoid those fumigation part. So that's what we did. We used two cyan variety. We have ananas in the German pink, two big fruit type variety, pretty good quality. And we grafted them into Buford and Peridor and Maxiford. This year, I wasn't able to find this variety. And for some reason, seed companies don't carry over seeds over years anymore. I don't know why. So I couldn't find this one. For rootstock, I have a Buford and this. And for the combinations, for German pink, I do have a self-grafted German pink as control. I have a non-grafted, grafted on itself as control. But for ananas, I didn't have enough seeds. So that's the combination of grafting, grafted tomatoes. And I can tell you I didn't take this picture. I didn't, really. It's a little fuzzy, but this is German pink. And this is ananas norer. It's very tasty variety. Same thing, we do the tubing grafting method. We grafted in the greenhouse. Last year, we were late. So we planted them in May. Usually, in this area, we will plant them in the high tunnel late week of March or early April. But we were late. We were not getting the seeds in time. For some reason, the seed company agreed to send me the seeds. They forgot to do it. So anyhow, and then the first batch of the grafted stuff, it were killed with one weekend. I guess my technician was not on campus. And the student worker didn't do a good job. They just cooked. When they were in the chamber, so in the greenhouse with the sunlight, with the black stuff on it, they were killed. So people asked me, did you fire your student worker? I said, no, I didn't. I gave him another chance. No story. So this is my high tunnel, 30 by 96, with rich vent. And this is a single layer. This is a double layer. It's a different man's brand. And remember, we are in zone 5B. And like I said, we planted them late. And then we ran right into this heat weather. So for quite a few while, we didn't have a harvest because it was too hot. But however, we kept them there, kept them going until late fall. So we do have some data for last year. And this is how my plants look like. I do have an automatic system to drop the curtain down and up, and also a controller to control the rich vent. So I had a pretty good system to automatically manipulate my temperature just because I cannot be there every day. Neither did my technician. So when I was preparing this talk yesterday, I used one previous presentation. I have the extreme hot and dry summer in 2011. But it wasn't true anymore. This year was even bad. So I removed our word. But still tells you, in late June to almost the early part of August, we have a really, really, to this part as well, really bad weather. And we know that, I think I have another line here. Pretty much here, 75, you see the plant growths for tomatoes get influenced. About 97, I think, pollination will stop. And if it's about 102 degrees, the whole plant may just not grow. So this is especially true for heirloom tomatoes, which primarily is just indeterminate. So you can see, I do have some heat tolerant varieties there. Unfortunately, this is my variety trial part. That's not the grafted part. But other, just like this, for a long time, no fruit because pollination was impossible. So we do see some temperature difference between the two high tunnels. The single layer versus double layer, basically early in the morning, the single layer has a higher temperature. And then the night, the night you double layer has a higher temperature. This is May. And then the PR is from the synthetic activity radiation. You see the difference between the two layer system in the high tunnels. So if you think about maintain the heat in a high tunnel, you may think about using double layer. But in the zone 6B or above, I don't think it's necessary. Just give you some environmental factors there to help explain the result. So for the yield, this is single layer. We have a green German pink, German pink, on German pink, and then on three rootstocks. You see pretty much similar from August here. I didn't have any harvest. And then I do have some harvest starting in the late, early part of October until the frost came, well, not frost. The freeze temperature came in. I was actually in Pennsylvania for a meeting when my technician students harvest those tomatoes. So you see, really, you don't see a lot of big difference. For double layer, you do see some difference here. For this one, the green line is the German pink on Buford. And we always see the maxiford will transform the most vigor to your sion. But under that condition, if it is so hot, Buford is less vigorous rootstock variety. Actually, it did better than others. And for this one, you can see the non-graphic one overall performed the worst. So we still see some difference in double layer polys. For the ananas, you see the similar chain, but you don't see a lot of big difference here. So for the double layer, this one on this emperor door, rootstock did a little bit better than others, similar to this one. So we put this in together for the ananas. German pink, we see very the difference between the rootstock treatment, different rootstock sion combinations. For example, this one, the double layer seems to be better for this one as well, but others may not. So it varies, depends on the variety. But for ananas, the other variety, you see the double layer did better. So we do see the difference between the two types of high tunnels when you graft the tomatoes. So this is the result. Generally speaking, I don't see a lot of difference between the grafted ones and non-graphed ones, even though I think for ananas nor one rootstock variety performed better. And we see the difference, the non-graphed tend to be lower yield. But because the heat last year, it didn't show the potential difference. So I cannot see the significantly different. But in the field, in the greenhouse, I did see that the grafted ones were more vigorous. Here is the arrow sown temperature was different between the single double layer high tunnels. So basically, the take home message for you is grafting can enhance vigor. Number one, number two, the double layer will be better. And whether the grafting had a benefit or advantage on this trial, I cannot tell you. But this year, we may have a better result. However, well, this year, we tried the same variety on different rootstocks, one, two, three, four, five. However, when I was trying to analyze data, found out that the control were not included there. I mean, data was there, but for the arranged data, were not there, so I wasn't able to do the statistical analysis. So I will present the data probably at the Great Plains Conference in January and also going to post the results on our website. So you'll get this sooner or later. OK, this is just a quick update. And again, this is just a research result. I think I have a couple of minutes for questions. Yes? Does Cantaloupe fall in the same category as watermelon? Yeah, his question is whether people have been doing research or demonstration with cucurbit stuff like watermelon and cucumbers. I haven't done this yet. I have collected three cucumber rootstock varieties, which can also be used for watermelon and the melon. So I'm going to do some research with the cucumber, the English cucumber type this year. Dr. Xin Zhao from the University of Florida she's been doing melon cantaloupe grafting study. And there's not a USDA guy doing watermelon. So there's a big, especially crop research initiative grant. It is looking at different aspects of grafting. So that grant started last year. I'm assuming results will start to come out next year. But in China, they graft all watermelons and cucumbers and melons in the greenhouse and high ton of sediments. They are doing great. It's a similar process as melons and cucumbers. Yes, yes. For all cucurbits, the grafting method will be similar. And their results may vary because if you're talking about watermelon and melon, you're talking about the sugar content. So sometimes if you're not careful and choose the wrong variety, the quality may be reduced. However, the research done by USDA people with watermelon, we found out if you grafted them, it enhanced the shelf life. Other questions? The resources were specifics of grafting and planting schedule. Is there any more online resources or books that you might suggest for vegetable grafting in general? There are quite a few publications for farmers. It's extension publications. There are some research projects as well. I know in hard science, in hard technology, there are some publications on grafted tomatoes. And there is a review in hard science on grafted watermelons and other cucurbits. So I don't know how good you are with scientific journal, but at least you can try. If you want to do the scholar.google.com, you can get a lot of scientific information there.