Grow your own egg & chips!
21.08.2023 - 12:04
/ theunconventionalgardener.com
/ Emma Doughty
Grafting is a time-honoured technique for growing fruit trees – it allows gardeners and farmers to choose both the variety of fruit they want to grow, and the rootstock they want to grow it on. You can even graft more than one variety of fruit onto one rootstock, giving you a ‘family’ tree that saves space and spreads the harvest time, or gives you both ‘cookers’ and ‘eaters’ from one tree. Grafting vegetables, on the other hand, is something relatively new that has burst onto the home gardening scene in the last few years. Last year T&M gave us the opportunity to grow the TomTato, a tomato plant grafted onto potato roots that grows both tomatoes and potatoes – catchily nicknamed the Ketchup ‘n’ fries plant. This year they have added a new dual-purpose plant to their range: the Egg & Chips plant grows both aubergines (AKA eggplant) and potatoes.
My first question, on hearing this news was “doesn’t this just make aubergines harder to grow?” – they’re heat-loving plants that are somewhat marginal in the UK climate, although I am reliably informed by one of my Twitter followers that she finds them easier to grow here than peppers. It’s true that I’ve only tried to grow them once – I don’t enjoy eating aubergines, but have never seen that as a reason not to give a plant a go! They certainly make attractive specimens. Mine (which were Calliope F1) were slightly furry, with beautiful purple flowers and striped fruit.
But the point of grafting vegetables is to make them easier to grow. Grafting aims at making plants stronger, easier to grow and more reliable. Reports on grafted tomatoes and peppers do seem to confirm that they are more vigorous, highly productive plants that crop more reliably during a British summer
The website greengrove.cc is an aggregator of news from open sources. The source is indicated at the beginning and at the end of the announcement. You can
send a complaint on the news if you find it unreliable.