Mia, You can relax. Y'all are safe from further photos. When God passed out the photography gene and the technology gene, I was out playing in the garden and missed out on both. As Carol noted, my adult son took the photos. He not only took them, but he also uploaded them (or whatever you call it) to his photobucket account. Then, he emailed them to me one by one so I could save them on my computer. Then he emailed me a document that said "How To Post Photos On Gardenweb". I thought it would be something that actually told me how to post photos, but it was just six URLs--two for each of the three photos. He said for me to try the first group and if they didn't work, then to use the second group. Well, the first group of URLs didn't work, but the second one did. So, the extent of my involvement in the whole thing, other than lining up all the tomatoes on the little table and then putting them back into bowls to carry back into the kitchen afterwards, was to cut and past the photo URL into the box that says Optional Link URL. I have so much trouble doing anything on a computer that I was sure it wouldn't work, but it did. Maybe one day I will master the art of taking and posting photos, but generally I don't even have the patience or the time to try to do it. When Chris tries to explain it to me verbally, his words go in one ear, scramble themselves up in my brain, and become virtually indecipherable. Then they fly out of my other ear and I do not remember one word he said. I think I have technology dyslexia. Remember in all the Charlie Brown/Peanuts television cartoons that when the adults speak, the kids hear something like "wank wank wank wank wank"? Well, that's what my brain hears when anyone tries to tell me how to do anything involving a computer, a smartphone (my phone is smarter than me), or a camera. I am the only person in the world who goes into a phone store and says "I want a phone that is just a phone. I don't want a phone that has a camera or internet service or anything else. I just want a telephone." When my last little Motorola Razor phone died about a year ago, my former daughter-in-law gave me her old smartphone and it is too smart for me but I guess I am stuck with it now. Tim and Chris keep telling me I am eligible for a phone upgrade and should get a newer, better smartphone with more capability. My answer to them is "why?". That leaves them stumped because they know I use my phone mostly for phone calls and text messages so a fancier phone that does cool stuff still would be underutilized by me. Anyhow, what y'all have to understand about me and "time" in the summer harvest season is that I have a big harvest of something, like the Saturday tomato harvest, at least a couple of times a week. I then work frantically in the kitchen trying to preserve however much of it we cannot eat fresh. By the time I have cleared counter space in the kitchen and can breathe a sigh of relief, it is time to harvest again. In the last two weeks, we have had multiple harvests of onions, summer squash/zucchini, plums and green beans that equal or exceed the amount of tomatoes shown on that table, so I am always severely time challenged at a time when I actually probably would enjoy taking and posting photos of all the bounty from the garden if only I had the time to learn how to do it and then to do it. I do not yet know what 2012's harvest will be like overall, but so far it resembles 2010, when I spent probably at least six straight weeks processing food, mostly via dehydrating and canning, for about 18 hours a day every day. In either 2008 or 2009 there was one horrible week when I actually counted the peppers piled up all over the house awaiting processing and there were 1800. Now, at least 600 to 800 of those were tiny bird peppers and all I did with them was wash them and put them in the dehydrator, but dealing with the rest of the peppers took a couple of weeks of hard labor and, in the meantime, I was continuing to harvest more. Today I am supposed to harvest zucchini and summer squash from my 33 plants (saturation planting was my goal this year and I'll have to explain that later 'cause the tomatoes in the kitchen are calling to me and telling me I need to get busy canning them), green beans from the white half-runners, cukes from the pickling cucumber plants (guess what that means?), and harvest tomatoes again because they are ready today and ripe tomatoes won't wait. I also need to harvest jalapeno peppers. Oh, and dig potatoes. And lay out the drip irrigation lines in the whole garden, weed and mulch the mid-season and late-season corn, and spray the tomato plants with Daconil. Other than that, I have nothing to do today except we need to mow and weedeat 3 or 4 acres in an effort to chase away grasshoppers that prefer tall grass and predator animals that like to remain hidden in it. The downside to cutting the tall grass is that then the bobcats jump the garden gate and hide in/under the tomato plants where they scare the you-know-what out of me when I see them there. Tim and I joke that we've had 'new' lawn furniture for 8 years and never have sat on the chairs or the glider. That's not much of an exaggeration, but the cats love the lawn furniture and sit on it all the time, and our 120-lb. Rottweiler sits/lays on the garden park-style bench all the time. It is now his bench and not mine. Carol, It is a ridiculous amount of tomatoes to have at once. We cannot possibly begin to even eat one of each variety fresh before they get overripe. I've given away about 7 gallons of them so far, and today I am dehydrating the bite-sized ones and turning the others into yummy tomato sauce, stewed tomatoes or strained puree. Maybe I'll make salsa. The possibilities or limitless, though the time available is not. I hope your tomato harvest comes in soon. I know you'll have a great harvest. Y'all know mine is early because I am so far south and because I planted a month early. Keith, By now you've read my explanation to Mia about how technologically challenged I am. Nothing I said is an exaggeration. I have so much trouble with technological things that I still am amazed every time I send an email or a text message and it actually arrives at its intended destination. Every year I set a goal for myself in the garden. Really, I have two new goals every year, and I am sad to say that they are the same two new goals every year and I fail miserably at both every year. Goal #1 always, always, always is this: "This year I will spray every tomato plant with Daconil the very first day I put it into the ground, and then I will do preventive spraying with Daconial, alternating with some other fungicide, on a regular basis for the whole season." This has never happened. It never even has come close to happening, although I think I did spray my container tomato plants with copper in either 2008 or 2009 when they had Septoria Leaf Spot. In fact, I actually did buy Daconil in April 2012, about a month after the first tomato plants went into the ground, and I sincerely meant to use it. So far, it remains unopened, just sitting there on the potting bench in the potting shed like some sort of cute decorative object. I do intend (insert incredulous laughter from my husband here) to spray the tomato plants with Daconil today. The last time I bought a garden sprayer so I could spray the plants with Daconil or copper, it sat unopened in the cardboard box for two years. I hate spraying anything on my plants. I finally opened that box with the new sprayer this year and sprayed Bt on the garden when the variegated climbing cutworms were decimating my garden. The second goal is always the same: "This year I will figure out how to take photos, how to find them on the phone again after I take them, and how to transfer them to something on the computer so I can post them. Then I'll learn how to post them, and I'll do it until everyone is sick of looking at my garden." So, tell me how I am doing on that goal? (insert laughter here) If gardening required me to be high-tech, I couldn't garden. Now I am headed off to the kitchen to get out the tomato strainer and start working my way through all those bowls of tomatoes. Then, after that's done, I'm gonna go outside and pick more tomatoes and then spray my plants with Daconil. Y'all probably shouldn't waste your time expecting to see a photo of more tomatoes today because Chris is at work! lol Dawn

Sey and Malcom, so sorry I've missed your responses. I used the tube graft technique (a 45-degree angled cut to roostock and scion of the same diameter, then aligning them together using a small silicone clip that I bought from Johnny's). Then kept in an upside-down clear plastic storage bin (so the seedlings sat on the inside of the lid and the clear plastic bin became their cover), out of direct light and near a space heater, and sprayed water mist into the bin every day to keep it humid. After a few days I'd vent it more and more to acclimate to regular conditions, and didn't put the seedlings back into direct light until it looked like the graft had healed (maybe a week?). I don't remember how many died, but I definitely had more die than survive -- I found it really hard to work with such tiny diameter stems and get the angle just so. This year I've bought aquarium tubing to cut into clips so that maybe I can try some larger diameter stems. I found that the Maxifort seeds germinated more quickly than the heirlooms, and that the seedlings also grew more quickly once emerged, so to get the diameters to match I had to plant Maxifort several days to a week later than the heirlooms. Worst case scenario, if your heirlooms are larger than the rootstock at grafting time, you can cut the scion at a higher point on the heirloom plant to get a smaller diameter stem if it's too thick at the base. But you want to cut the Maxifort low (below the first leaves), so you are kind of stuck with that diameter (so if it's bigger than all your scions, you're in trouble). The plants were in a raised garden w/ commercial garden soil and Tomato Tone added at transplant and every 2 weeks. Sun 8-9 hours a day. Watered by mother nature and added light hand-watering by hose here and there - not a regular schedule. I use Texas Tomato Cages and do not prune, but pull off diseased-looking foliage on a weekly basis. No pesticides. There was no difference at all in the fruit produced - neither size/shape nor flavor differed. I only tried Maxifort but have read and watched YouTube videos (one in particular is an hour-long lecture by a professor at Kansas State who presents data showing different results with different rootstock and suggests when you might want one over another). It seems that Maxifort is king, Beaufort also great, and Celebrity F1 can be used for a much cheaper price per seed (and would make edible tomatoes if you happen to get rootstock suckers and let them grow and flower at the base of the plant). My experience is obviously extremely limited and I only have these four plants to compare, so take it with a grain of salt. But I've at least convinced myself it's worth another trial! Jen

FWIW, Carolyn137 mentioned in another thread that a colleague says that some hybrid tomatoes with disease resistance can be successfully used as rootstock as well as Maxifort. She mentioned Celebrity but extended it to include some other tomato plants with hybrid disease resistance. So you can grow your own rootstock if you can't come by the standard Maxifort. The hybridizer I spoke with said they had tested Celebrity but there are other well known hybrids that have the same tolerances as noted by their variety names, as can be seen if one just looks at the TGS website/catalog, for instance. Big Beef is also VFFNTA, for instance.

Lindalana: From all my research there are only a few specific rootstocks one should use for optimum production: Rootstocks widely used for grafting tomato are hybrids between tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), called intraspecific hybrid, or hybrids between tomato (S. lycopersicum) and a wild relative to tomato (such as S. habrochaites) called interspecific hybrid. Interspecific hybrid rootstocks are generally more vigorous but sometimes lack uniformity of germination/seedling emergence. When you choose rootstocks for tomato, in addition to the rootstockâÂÂs resistances, you need to select the rootstock based on the expected level of vigor, relative to your scion. If scion is a less vigorous variety and if a very vigorous rootstock is used, adding vigor to the scion is expected. However, if rootstock is too vigorous relative to scion, you may experience an overly vegetative growth of your tomato plants, potentially reducing yields. Some rootstocks can achieve higher yields even without disease present in the root zone (such as in hydroponics). The top rootstocks for grafting are: Colossus Maxifort Estamino I suppose you can use any disease resistant hybrid and it may work but you will not get the production and long-season production in addition to superb disease-resistance. As of July 12 my grafted tomato plants using Maxifort and growing better than any of my standard tomato plants and with lots more tomatoes. My regular tomatoes are doing very well but they are no where near the size and with less tomatoes than the grafted ones. I have been more than impressed with the grafted tomato plants but still will hold final judgement until maturity, production and length of production ends.