I'll be curious to hear how your grafting experience turns out. I grafted tomatoes maybe 5 years ago and it did not work well, so I've never done it again. The grafting process set the plants back maybe 2 weeks. I planted them in the field next to my non-grafted tomatoes, and they did very well for several weeks, did not seem to be affected by the blight and other disease that slowly crept up my regular tomatoes. But then some sort of wilt hit the grafted plants and they died very quickly, within days. I've never had that happen to tomatoes before.

I've talked to a few other farmers who have tried grafting and they had similar results, but I am curious to hear from anyone who's had success with grafting. I'm an organic grower, and there was only one organic rootstock available at the time. It was expensive too, around $1 per seed. Yields would have to be much greater to justify the increase time and money that goes into grafting.

I think I'm better off staggering my planting dates to have young healthy plants to replace early tomatoes that may succumb to blight or leaf spot. I know that grafting is more common in Europe and Asia, and farmers there must have success with it, but I do wonder if this is a way for the seed companies to keep us buying seeds. I think all the rootstock seeds are hybrids. Expensive hybrids.

theres info on grafting here

Here is a link that might be useful: graft (and corruption)

Like MdGardener i had tried and probably won't do again anytime soon. However at a recent veg conference I heard research results showing increased yield only on hybrid scion plants which I found interesting. The reasoning is that:

1. Grafting onto a disease resistant rootstock does nothing to prevent foliar diseases that us northern growers predominantly have and thus when we graft an heirloom plant onto disease resistant rootstock we get no benefit.

2. Grafting hybrid plants with foliar disease resistance onto the more vigorous rootstock may allow the foliar disease resistant scion to tap into the greater nutrient flow from those roots.

Whit these issues stated the whole process is a big pain in the xxxx. Getting grafts to take is no easy feat. I usually achieved 60% success. Then the headaches just begin because you need to be extra careful to plant shallow so your scions don't root. Then you need to be aggressive with suckering the stems which will want to constantly grow from the rootstock.

The rootstock (Maxifort) that I used didn't produce greater yield for me but the plants looked more healthy at the end of a 7 month growth in a high tunnel. The year-end cleanup was twice the work since I couldn't pull out those rootstock plants at season end as done with non-grafted plants.

Interesting article in last issue of Fine Gardening comparing grafted to non-grafted tomatoes. I tried grafting a few years ago with not worth the trouble success. I learned from FG that grafted tomatoes do not like to be treated with care to produce well. So I may give it another go because I still have some root stock seeds.