Disclaimer: This post was originally posted by Newbie LinFL. This was originally posted on September 3, 2013.
I had one - a Cleota Pink I grafted onto Maxifort. It was a great big bushy plant, and one of the last tomato plants standing after the crazy rains started. (We had rain almost every single day in July, and lots of cloudy days with rain off and on all day - we got almost half of our average annual rainfall just in July. The plants were wet almost 24/7 for the entire month. There was no keeping tomato plants healthy under those conditions, when sprays would just wash off within a few hours.) When I dug it out, it had an enormous root ball that occupied almost the entire box.
I got 16 1/2 pounds of nice big tomatoes off it - 23 tomatoes averaging over 11 ounces each. The largest two were almost twice that weight. The plant actually set and grew 7-8 more tomatoes, but the rains and resulting splitting and rot got the last ones...and the squirrels got a couple. I only counted the tomatoes that were edible.
The plant was still blooming like mad for weeks after the heat caused it to quit setting tomatoes in late May. If it had been a heat-setting type or if the temperatures had been a little cooler, I might have been able to a lot more tomatoes off it.
I did not have an ungrafted Cleota Pink to compare (that plant suffered a mishap as a seedling). So maybe Cleota Pink is always that vigorous and productive. But I was impressed with that grafted plant, for sure.
Grafting doesn't help tomatoes set fruit in the heat, unfortunately. I had some more grafted plants - Amish Paste and Burgundy Traveler - whose yield was disappointing. They were a couple of weeks behind Cleota Pink, and they were just starting to bloom heavily when the heat shut down fruit set. Two weeks made the difference between a plant full of tomatoes and a plant full of falling blossoms. If you are in a hot summer climate, you need to be careful to start plants you plan to graft a couple of weeks earlier than your other tomatoes. They need time to recover from grafting so they will be ready for transplant ASAP after last frost. Otherwise, they won't have time to set a full crop before the heat shuts down fruit set. You don't have the luxury of waiting for grafted plants to heal and catch up.
Likewise, if you buy grafted plants, make sure you use a company that can ship your plants at the right planting time for your area. Most of the companies selling grafted plants ship them too late for the Gulf Coast, much of Texas, and the Southwest.
