Allotments 4 All

Thomson and Morgan's latest offering, aubergines on top, potatoes underneath. Don't think I will bother, but does anybody else use these silly plants like their tomtato.

I've got one of their bean plants that grows on jerusalem artichoke rootstock ... perfect for windy sites!

Quote from: squeezyjohn on January 17, 2016, 10:41:08
jerusalem artichoke rootstock ... perfect for windy sites!

Hmm, well, I'll say no more.

Like your new avatars Ace! I saw a lot of those hats at the Bearded Theory festival last year....
Not sure I get the point of these cobbled together plants, potatoes and aubergine need quite different growing conditions to be happy even if they are related, I know someone who tried the tomato/potato  plants and neither did well, miserable crops and got blighted badly to boot. Smacks of the seed companies just trying to be clever, very expensive tinkering for the sake of it?

these very expensive novelty plants i think are there just to catch the gardener but most of us think i wonder if i try one maybe

I've tried grafting cucumbers onto figleaf/malabar gourd (C.ficifolia) and it worked well. It helps that any excess rootstocks are still useful to produce food.

My next plan is to get a god cucumber with 3 or 4 nodes and graft a rootstock under each node to get 3 or 4 plants.

You can usually buy a suitable F1 plant in March eg. Passandra - for £1 if you know where to go -  in my experience you have to avoid both city- and clustered- (cartel) garden centres.

The other one I'm tempted to try is grafting peppers onto either the lychee tomato (S.sysimbriifolium) or the hairy/rocoto/manzano chilli (C.pubescens) or maybe the pepino (Solanum muricatum) - all 3  useful croppers in their own right and also much tougher perennials than any other pepper or tomato.

You have to aim high occasionally!

Cheers.

PS. I lost all my pepinos in the terrible winter of '10/ '11 - a particularly galling mistake to have none indoors that year - especially as they were named selected clones like 'otovalo' and they were probably the easiest rooters of anything I've grown.  By the time that string of lousy winters were over I had bigger problems to deal with... Does anyone still grow similar pepinos?  I would like  to do a swap for cuttings. Obviously I could use seedlings for rootstock work, but I prefer to raise dual-purpose plants if possible.