With our community garden site completed in Mt Vernon, it was time to turn our attention to our home garden. Thanks to some straw mulched around all our plants and wood chips in our pathways the weeds did not get too far ahead of us.
This year we are focusing some energy towards building up our heritage bean seed stock. We started with a small supply of Cherokee Greasy and Grady Bailey beans with the hope of acquiring of seed for commercial production next year. The plants are coming along nicely.
Today Melinda and I focused our energy on planting and staking some grafted tomato plants for trials. We are specifically looking at disease resistant and yields. Initially our thought was to keep a journal on this project, but in the end we decided to keep out journal here on the blog spot. We planted 5 Arkansas Traveler tomatoes grafted onto Maxifort root stock directly beside 3 Arkansas Travelers from seed. Each was planted with one trowel full of five year old horse manure. To be fair, the grafted plant were about 24 inches tall and the non grafted were about 10 inches tall.
Next to these we planted 4 Roma vf tomatoes grafted onto Maxifort root stock. Also with one scoop of the same compost. These were also close to 24 inches tall. We had 2 of our own Roma vf tomatoes we had started from seed and they came in at about the same size as the grafted, also planted with the same scoop of compost.
We also planted 2 Mountain Magic tomatoes and 3 Ozark Pinks that had been grafted onto the Maxifort root stock as well but had no standard transplants for comparison. We will update them in hopes that someone out there has some non grafted and can share their yields and health issues with us for comparison.
Very excited for thursday to come, as we will be getting some grafted Sun Gold cherry tomatoes to trial. Although a great treat off the vine we are very excited about trying them out in the solar food drier we have yet to build.
Happy Growing everyone.
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