How on earth do you expect someone to take your video seriously with a thumbnail like that?!
Not only do the tomatoes look incredibly badly photoshopped in, but it looks like your thumb is growing out of your shoulder 😂
this post was submitted on 30 Jun 2024
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What hath science wrought‽
Seriously though, neat video. I'm not sure it's very practical for anybody except maybe apartment/condo folks trying to maximize space on a small balcony or something though, because it seems like the tomato and potato yields were smaller than they otherwise would have been.
I wonder if the yields would improve with less tomato grafts or keeping some of the potato shoots intact
On large fields it is probably too much work to do this, but in regular gardens I would say having the tomatoes grow a bit slower is of benefit to space the yield over the season and having some "free" potatoes at the end of the season is nice to have.
Yields from this sort of grafting will almost always be lower than a tomato plant and a potato plant alone. A plant has a kinda "energy budget" for growth; It uses this much energy for vegetative growth, that much for roots, some more for fruit, etc. A tomato/potato graft is trying to "spend" large amounts of energy both growing large tomato fruits and growing tubers underground, so you end up with mediocre yields of both.
Even the tiny fruits a potato grows represent a small energy loss. Which (IMO) is why so many popular potato breeds don't produce true seed, you get just a little bit more potato that way.
Interestingly sometimes in potato breeding the opposite of this graft is used, a potato top on tomato roots. That way the potato greenery is flush with nutrients and can set a much heavier crop of fruits, allowing breeders to collect more seeds from their potential cross.