How I Grew Potatoes And Tomatoes On The Same Plant

did you know that since potatoes and tomatoes are in the same family that you can merge them together with grafting to create one plant that produces potatoes underneath the ground and tomatoes on the top well today I'm going to have a go at creating one of these pimados or tomatoes and I'll share with you the whole process right through to the end and who knows if this all works out maybe I'll be able to make my own ketchup and fries from ingredients grown all on the same plant so to start this project we need a tomato plant and a potato plant so let's get those sorted first so here I've got some tomato seeds and I'm sewing these into some seedling trays in early spring after a few weeks I had a bunch of little tomato plants coming up and I just kept them growing indoors by a sunny window while it was still a bit cold outside to plant once they had started to outgrow the seed trays I potted them up so they could get a bit bigger before I planted them out in the garden when the weather was warmer here I've got a few seed potatoes two different types and I've left these in a bright place so they could start to sprout and you can see the Sprouts coming out there it's late spring now and these grow really quickly so they should easily catch up to the tomato plants that I started a few months ago I'm planting them pretty much as deep as I can in these small pots using a mix of compost and potting mix and there is a reason why I've used these small pots for now and you'll see why in just a little bit all right now that we've got the plants ready it's time to graft them together we do need some clean tools for this so I'm using some methylated spirits to clean the cigarettes and grafting knife and you don't have to use a grafting knife you can just use a Stanley knife or box cutter instead as long as it's nice and sharp okay so what we need to do is take some cuttings from the tomato plants that are about the same thickness as the stem of the potato plants the tomatoes have gotten really bushy and need a good prune anyway so I'm finding some suckers or side shoots that are a suitable size for the grafting I'm now just removing most of the leaves off The Cutting because the more leaves you have the faster The Cutting will lose moisture dry out and potentially die so I'm just making sure I leave the growing tip intact at the top okay so with the grafting let's cut this potato plant off at a point that matches the same thickness of our cutting and I would recommend doing this in a shaded area away from the wind now we're going to slice down the middle of the stem a few centimeters deep Now using the Tomato cutting I'm just doing a long angled cut on both sides to create a v that's about the same length as the slice that we made in the potato stem it might take a few goes to get it to the right shape so don't worry if you need to do multiple cuts it definitely took me a few goes to get it right now we can just push the tomato plant into the potato stem and since we have the same thickness it should line up on both sides but if it doesn't just focus on making sure one side lines up really well with the outer part of the stem staying flush last thing I'm doing is just wrapping it in some grafting tape to hold it tightly together and I'm just wrapping it around nice and secure you can also use like a grafting clip instead to hold these together but I figured the tape should give a bit of extra protection from the graph drying out one last thing I'm testing out is doing a weapon tongue graft to see if this works any better than the cleft graft it's basically cutting an angled cut on both the potato and on the tomato and then coming about a third of the way down and slicing down into the stem of both then you can just slide them together and the tongues should just hold them in place ready to then wrap them up in the grafting tape since these potatoes have grown multiple stems I figure I may as well just increase my chances and graft onto every stem and I did lose track of where I planted all the different tomato varieties so if all these graphs work then we should end up with a plant that has several different tomato varieties all growing on the same plant so that could be pretty cool so the reason for planting the potatoes in small pots is so that I could easily bring them indoors into the shade while the graphs heal which should hopefully just take around a week or so I'm covering just one of these with a bag to increase the humidity and test out if this is something that they'll benefit from or not but that's pretty much it we'll see how it goes and I thought I'd quickly mention this book here which is a really helpful resource to have when learning to craft all sorts of things like tomatoes peaches mangoes apples avocados and even roses so I'll leave a link below in case you'd like to pick up a copy for yourself foreign so after a day or two all the stems were a little bit droopy like this one here but I've just seen this morning that the rest of them are all standing up nice and straight so that's a good sign and one thing I have been doing is just misting the plants about twice a day the ones under the bag are looking good too but I have just seen that the potatoes are trying to grow back from the stems on some of them so we'll go through and remove all of those so all the energy can just be focused on the tomatoes good news the final tomato stem has stood up straight now it might have taken a bit longer since it was just a bit bigger than the rest for the plants under the bag I want to start acclimatizing these now so I'm just going to leave the bag half off today I'm just going to remove the bag entirely and I've moved them somewhere with a bit more sun just to acclimatize them I don't think I'll use the bag cover again because turns out the other plants that didn't have the bag actually look a little bit healthier than the ones that did so yeah it didn't really have any benefit whatsoever curious to see how much they've come together so I'm just going to unwrap a few of these to see how they look oh wow look at that so just after eight days it's healed really well but yeah I will leave the other ones wrapped just for now to give them a bit longer to strengthen up [Music] foreign [Music] potting mix as well as a few sheet manure pellets and we'll mix those together the root system on this one looks really good and I'm just teasing them out slightly putting them in the pot and then making sure that I keep the grass above the surface so the tomatoes don't put out their own Roots I'm mulching them well with straw and then making a bamboo Tower to support the plants as they grow [Music] so that one's done and I'll do the other one just the same so today I'm removing all the grafting tape and overall even though all the graphs were successful I would say that in the future I'll probably just do the cleft graft since it was a lot easier and saying that when I did this Whip and tongue graft here it was a really crappy graft but instead of redoing it I thought I could just use it as a test to see if it would work and it did so in the right conditions it seems that tomatoes are pretty straightforward to graft successfully even if you don't do the best job I thought today I'd give these a bit of diluted worm tea from my worm farm and it's awesome to see there's some flowers on the tomatoes and even some fruit forming on some of them too all right guys so we've got some of these Tomatoes ripening up now we've got these beautiful orange ones all coming on now which is cool to see and these plants haven't been growing really vigorously throughout their life you can see they don't have huge amounts of leaves on them and they're not sort of growing really tall and I'm not too sure if that's because they're not on their own rootstock you know they are on a potato after all the other thing it could be is that I've got multiple plants growing out of the one rootstock and so maybe if I had cut off all the rest of the shoots and just grow in one tomato per rootstock maybe then it would have grown sort of taller and bushier I'm not too sure but I do like the look of having multiple types of tomatoes all on the one plant I think it's really cool to have you know these orange ones as well as these longer ones at the back they're a golden light tomato and then these ones here are indigo pear drop which is one of my favorite Tomatoes why don't we give this a try and see what it's like hmm juicy tastes just as good as all my other tomatoes that I have growing in my garden nice and sweet and juicy if you can't beat a home-grown tomato or any homegrown produce really definitely a success in terms of the flavor it's really good so I'm looking forward to the rest of these ripening up and I'll show you definitely what these Indigo pear drops look like when they're ripe they're really beautiful tomatoes and I'm really curious to see if there are potatoes growing under there so it's not quite ready to find out yet but it will be soon as the season continued on and the fruits ripened up I was able to continue harvesting and enjoying the different types of tomatoes my favorite one still being the Indigo pear drop tomatoes because they're nice and firm and they've got a great balance of flavor between acidic and sweet plus they look really unique and have a pretty good shelf life too so it turns out that I've got some red tomato varieties on here too which is cool and once all of these tomatoes are finished and the plants die back that's when I'll be harvesting the potatoes well hopefully there's some there to harvest we'll have to wait and see [Music] okay so these plants died off a little while ago so let's Harvest these and see if we've got anything in here oh we do have some oh wow okay so there's not heaps of big potatoes in here by any means but I mean we do have potatoes which is awesome uh yeah just not hugely big ones see if there's oh yeah there's a few more in there deeper down I think that's mostly all of them oh there we go it's a bit of a modest harvest in this one but I'm just stoked that this has worked so let's go and check on the other ones and see if we can Harvest some more check it out there we go beautiful golden looking potatoes definitely not as many on this one so there we go just a little bunch of potatoes on this one but I still find it pretty amazing that these grew just from the energy that the tomato plants provided and I had fun doing it so that's the main thing and I think also you know if you were able to Mound these up like you would normally with potatoes then you would have ended up with possibly a lot more but you can't really Mount them up so well if you've grafted a tomato on the top because you don't want to bury the graft but check out this graft here it's actually still holding together oh man that's tough ah finally and it didn't even rip it out of the grafting spot it broke it above it so that was pretty strong so with this being my first time ever harvesting potatoes and tomatoes from the same plant of course I have to get their final satisfaction of eating them together in one of the best food combinations out there ketchup and fries or as we would say in New Zealand chips and sauce I did freeze some of the tomatoes since they were ready before I could harvest the potatoes [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign time for the taste test and this almost feels kind of wrong since this all came from the same plant but here we go good crunch that is so good so satisfying and that ketchup is so incredibly good I'm definitely going to have to keep making this instead of buying it because it's like um nice and spicy really good fresh taste and if I could share one of these with you I totally would but I hope you found this video interesting and if you did you might also enjoy this video over here so feel free to check that out thanks so much for sticking around to the end and I'll see you in the next one so good

Channel: TheKiwiGrower

Views: 3,350,004

Keywords: i grew potatoes and tomatoes on the same plant - here's what happened, grafting potatoes and tomatoes together, grafting, learn how to graft, grafting tutorial, tomatoes and potaotes, pomato, tomtato, tomato growing, potato growing, the kiwi grower, new zealand gardener, blonde garden guy, kiwi gardener, grafting tomatoes, grafting potatoes, how to graft potatoes, how to graft tomatoes, whip and tongue, cleft graft, v graft, fun garden experiment, growing vegetables at home

Id: 41-59FfmsTA

Length: 12min 9sec (729 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 27 2022