Grafting

I'll post more about the market projects soon, but I wanted to take time to discuss something we did on Friday while I was working out at Howdy Farm. We grafted tomatoes! I was probably more excited about this than I should have been. I have been learning about grafting since the beginning of the semester in both my introduction to horticulture and international horticulture class that I am taking toward my minor. In fact, I just had a test Thursday on different typing of grafting. But, I still wasn't quite wrapping my head around how exactly it worked. I am definitely a hand on learner so anytime I can step out of the traditional classroom setting and learn by doing is always a good thing. So, on Friday another professor brought us two types of tomatoes and showed up how to graft them.

Let me give you a quick explanation of grafting for anyone one his not familiar (I was not until recently). It is the joining of two plants together so that they form a union and grow together as one. This is done for a variety of reasons in many plants. Some of the reasons include....

• Some plants cannot be propagated by other means
• Decreases amount of time for a plant to produce fruit
• To obtain desirable characteristics from two different plants such a disease resistant or adaption to a specific climate
• To create a new variety
• To repair damage

We had two types of tomatoes, Better Boy and Sweet 100. We grafted one with Better Boy on top  (the scion) and the Sweet 100 as the stock and one with the opposite. Here is a picture of a couple of the plants that we grafted with Sweet 100 as the scion. Basically we just cut off the scion of two of them and switched them and held the new scion on with a little grafting clip, making sure our scion and stock were approximately the same in diameter.

 I took home with me one plant of each plant. I covered them with a plastic bag and  have been spritzing water into it a couple of times a day. Keeping the tomatoes in a moist, not too hot environment should help the two plants to join together well. It should only take about a week before I can remove the clip holding them together. Hopefully I can keep the plants alive. 

Here is an approach graft we tried with the two tomato varieties...

I am so excited to watch the progress on these plants. I am definitely learning many new things about growing. I don't even think I had ever heard of grafting a couple of months ago.

New Market Projects

At the beginning of the semester, I conducted surveys a couple of Saturdays at the Farmers Market in Bryan. The results of surveying showed that most people who attended the market had been coming for years. We did not have many new people. We also noticed that we did not have many young people. Another noteworthy thing is that most people found out about the market through word of mouth, so marketing could certainly be improved. We knew we needed to do something in order to get fresh foods to a larger clientele of people here in the Brazos Valley. Enter, two new project.

1) Project number one. A Thursday afternoon market outside Blackwater Draw which is a local brew pub and restaurant that brews their own beer and already uses Howdy Farm produce on their menu. This market would be close to campus and at a convenient time, thus appealing to a totally different group of people.

2) Project number two. Making the first Saturday of the month at the Bryan Farmer's Market more of event. This would be done by inviting in extra vendors, artist, music, food trucks, etc. 

I will be reporting later with updates about both of these project!