Read our affiliate disclosure here.

Book Review: How to Graft Tomato Plants

Since 2010, Tomato Dirt has garnered 4.6+ million views, making it the web’s leading online source for growing tomatoes in the home garden. Award-winning writer and Tomato Dirt owner Kathy Widenhouse has helped thousands of home gardeners grow healthier tomatoes. Be one of them when you get Tomato Dirt’s Growing Guide here.

In their book, How To Graft Tomato Plants: A Guide for the Backyard Gardener (ISBN 9781495233104) Nathan and Telma Reed take the mystery out of grafting tomato plants and make the process accessible to everyone. (Buy it here).

On Amazon, it’s the only print resource devoted solely to grafting tomatoes. But that is not what makes it so appealing.

Rather, the Reeds use conversational language that makes the grafting process easy to understand.

There is no breeder mumbo-jumbo here. Instead, short chapters and simple how-tos show you what steps to take if you want to graft tomatoes for yourself.

The Booklet's Content

The booklet (32 pages) is written from personal experience of these two home gardeners. They explain what a grafted tomato is (two tomatoes combined together, each chosen for their strengths) and why they started grafting their own tomatoes in the first place.

What follows is a step-by-step explanation of the grafting process: choosing rootstock seed, scion seed, and materials; conducting the germination test, germinating and growing plants, grafting itself, healing grafted plants, and finally transplanting and caring for grafted plants.

The content is clear and to the point, so much so that it takes less than an hour to read the entire booklet from cover to cover.

The Booklet's Structure

The booklet’s set up makes it easy to find what you’re looking for.

• A well-organized and thorough table of contents provides quick reference to the various steps in tomato grafting.
• Bulleted lists, charts, and timetables provide quick information that’s easy to scan.

What You Won’t Find Here

Gorgeous photos. Though graphic illustrations (such as those showing how to cut the rootstock plant and the scion plant to create the graft) are clear and simple, photographs are fuzzy and printed in black and white.

An extensive resource list. You’ll find a short list of materials suppliers and web addresses for how-to videos, but not a thorough inventory.

A comprehensive grafting guide. This booklet explains one way to graft tomatoes that works for the home gardener. Commercial enterprises use micro grafting and tube grafting to produce larger numbers of grafted plants – explanations that are not practical here. Nor is there a history of grafting. Rather, the Reeds set out to show the average gardener how to improve tomato output in the garden by grafting tomato varieties that can produce the healthiest crop in their microclimate.

They succeed. How To Graft Tomato Plants: A Guide for the Backyard Gardener is a practical resource for the tomato gardener who wants to have a productive crop and a healthy garden.

If your tomato patch struggles with tomato diseases or you simply want to maximize the varieties you’ve chosen to grow in your microclimate, then consider grafting your tomatoes … with this resource right at your elbow to walk you through the process.

Available in print and Kindle

More about grafted tomatoes

Grafted tomatoes: what they are and why grow them ...

Return from Review: How to Graft Tomato Plants to Tomato Dirt home

As an Amazon Associate and Rakuten Advertising affiliate I earn from qualifying purchases.

---

SHARE THIS PAGE: