Grafting eggplants

[ottawagardener]

Other than for disease resistance or just creating cool chimera eggplant monsters, is there any other reason that you would graft an eggplant onto other solanum species.

I'm particularly interested in cold resistance or hardiness in low light. I did a brief search on this but came up with only a few links.

However, I do intent on trying my hand at a many fruited eggplant year 'cause I can... Actually, I might be too busy with other projects.

[ottawagardener]

No one? Anyone want to try it next year?

[canadamike]

Many people graft them at Tomodori, the french site. Rocoto, a member from Guadeloupe, send them seeds of a wild eggplant, they graft on it. I think biorag was one of them. They do a lot of tomato grafting too...

I am trying to see what the advantages would be for me but I can't figure out anything.... If I had a wetter climate and a longuer season, I woud probably think differently.

If it keeps on like that though, the wetter part might be soon covered by climatic change....

[michaeljohnson]

The main reason that some people graft egg plants onto tomato base stems, is that it is particularly usefull if you get a lot of rain in early spring followed by drought and then heavy rain again late summer, egg plants roots do not rot and wither like tomatoes do under those conditions, they also produce stocky shorter more compact tomato plants-they perform best when the ground is saturated for long periods of time, and most tomatoes tend to start showing leaf yellowing and rotting at this stage.
But you have to sow the egg plant seeds several weeks earlier than the tomatoes, as they are much slower growing to start with and need to catch up a bit first,
I am going to try a few this year on several types of Brandywine tomatoes and other shy croppers.

Personaly I find that the best grafting tomato rootstock ever is a fairly new variety on the market called He-Man, from Japan, it seems to be only available in Europe at the moment and is totally resistant to everything you can think of, the seeds are very expensive though at around £7.00 English pounds, for 25 seeds.
In trials-it beat hands down, egg plant grafts, and other tomato rootstock brands, by a wide margin. each plant produced up to sixty percent more tomatoes on it by weight and quantity, and suffered no disease problems at all, on either roots or leaves.

Read this- cat.inist.fr/?aModule=afficheN&cpsidt=17243104

[ottawagardener]

That's interesting, I had read yet about grafting eggplants onto tomatoes just tomatoes onto eggplants.

[michaeljohnson]

That's funny- when I clicked own my own link to the info, the wording has dissapeaared, but it was there yesterday, I wonder what happened to it.