Vegetable Grafting

Grafting is an environmentally friendly cultural practice and innovation that has evolved into an important growing tool for sustainable vegetable production, in both protected culture and open field systems, in many countries around the world. The use of grafted vegetable plants substantially reduces the use of pesticides while improving plant health and crop yield. Several destructive soil-borne diseases in cucurbitaceous (e.g., watermelon, cucumber, and melon) and solanaceous (e.g., tomato, eggplant, and pepper) vegetables, such as Fusarium wilt, Verticillium wilt, and bacterial wilt, as well as root-knot nematodes, can be effectively controlled by using resistant rootstocks. In addition, improved tolerance to abiotic stressors and enhanced water and nutrient use efficiency are often achieved in growing grafted vegetable plants. By combining a scion cultivar, which provides desirable aboveground produce traits, with a rootstock, which offers soil-borne disease resistance/tolerance and other favorable root characteristics, grafting can be more rapid than regular breeding to unite positive genetic and physiological traits that confer elevated crop vigor, resilience, and productivity. Rootstock selection and breeding have played a major role in expanding the application of vegetable grafting, while plant propagation improvement and grafting automation efforts have largely increased the industry capacity of supplying high quality grafted transplants to meet growers’ needs. Incomplete disease resistance in rootstocks, mixed results regarding rootstock influence on fruit quality, excessive vegetative growth of grafted plants, and high costs of grafted transplants still present challenges in adoption of vegetable grafting. Interdisciplinary research is advancing to elucidate the underlying mechanisms of graft healing and rootstock-scion interactions at cellular and molecular levels to promote efficient and cost-effective use of grafted vegetable transplants in diverse cultivation environments and conditions. Best management practices and decision support tools are being developed for grafted vegetable production to enhance grafting gains and address site-specific constraints. Grafting has also been increasingly used as a novel approach in fundamental plant research. With the long-term goal of advancing vegetable grafting research, application, and technology development, the Working Group Vegetable Grafting aims to provide a platform to foster information exchange, technology transfer, and transdisciplinary collaborations by building a strong network among scientists, students, young professionals, educators, extension experts, nurseries, seed companies, and various vegetable industry sectors and relevant stakeholders across geographic regions.