Pat Munts: Grafted vegetables full of possibilities

Reading seed catalogs can be dangerous. Like most gardeners, I easily fall prey to a few of their enticing offerings each year. This year, however, I fell hard for a whole list of plants from Territorial Seed Co. out of Cottage Grove, Oregon. Over the next few months I am going to share a series of growing tests for grafted eggplant, a watermelon bred in North Idaho, sweet potatoes and a plant called Ketchup and Fries.

Grafted vegetables hit the home garden market a few years back with a lot of fanfare and promises of better production, more tolerance of early spring cold soils and better disease resistance. I first tried several varieties of grafted tomatoes with mixed results. I didn’t get the increase in production and they didn’t seem to grow any better than the nongrafted plants even in side-by-side tests with regular plants of the same variety. I hadn’t tried eggplants, however. Grafting was supposed to substantially increase production. More eggplant at our house means more fried eggplant steaks.

So I ordered three each of grafted and ungrafted Millionaire eggplant, a long slender dark purple variety that ripens in about 60 days. They arrived as spindly plants; the grafted ones were much bigger than the regular ones so we’ll see how that affects production. They’ve been in the ground about three weeks and are perking up.

I love watermelon so when I saw Blacktail Mountain had been developed in North Idaho, I had to try it. Watermelons are normally hard to grow here because of the short season and cold early summer soils that slow growth. Because the plants tend to ramble all over the place they don’t work in my compact garden. So I planted them in a community garden box under a solar film that raised the soil temperature 10 degrees. After three weeks in the ground, they were starting to send out new leaves.

At the other end of the garden box and under the same film, I planted Georgia Jet sweet potatoes. Several friends successfully grew them last year, so it was time I tried them. Georgia Jet is recommended for northern climates. I lost half of the dozen slips I got because they had to sit in a holding pot for a couple of weeks. The film warmed the ground to about 70 degrees, which is perfect for them, and after three weeks I have leaves shooting up.

Normally I am pretty frugal when buying mail-order plants; anything more than $7 to $8 isn’t worth it. However, when the catalog offered a tomato grafted onto a potato and called it Ketchup and Fries, I couldn’t resist and coughed up $20 to get it. Tomatoes and potatoes are in the same family so biologically this works and I have seen ads for them over the years. The tomato on the top of the plant will have small grape-size fruit while the potato roots should have about four to five pounds of potatoes. It’s planted in a large pot on my deck. Stay tuned.