One of the joys of gardening is occasionally pushing the envelope to see what happens. If you get away with it, you congratulate yourself on being smarter than the pundits. If it fails, well, at least you gained some experience.

I have grown subtropical things that weren’t supposed to grow as far north as my East Hampton garden, started things indoors, including corn, that aren’t supposed to survive transplanting, rooted cuttings from plants that the books will tell you can’t be propagated that way, and – best of all – taken a bag of fresh-cut lettuce from my garden to a dinner party in frozen February.

What started as a sort of party trick to make kids visiting the farm go “Wow!” has taken on a more serious purpose. Two years ago I grafted a tomato on to a potato. Tomatoes above, spuds below. It didn’t matter than neither the tomato nor the potato produced much, and nobody but me ever knew that none of them were worth eating. But the wow factor was definitely there.

I had some experience with grafting, but only with apples. I remember being impressed to learn that an apple tree grown from seed does not produce apples of that variety, and that because of this all apple varieties are grafts. Clones, actually.

To a serious gardener, there is nothing particularly remarkable about the tomato/potato marriage. Tomatoes and potatoes are both Solanaceae, an interesting family known as nightshades that includes peppers, tobacco, eggplant, and petunias as well as belladonna and Jimson weed. In theory, therefore, it is possible to graft any of them together. It is certainly possible to graft one variety of a species to another variety of that species. The question that springs to mind is, why would you want to do this unless you are so desperately insecure that you feel the need to impress a bunch of blasé high school kids?

The answer is taste, productivity, and disease. Tomatoes are allegedly the American vegetable gardener’s favorite crop. Some people grow nothing else. It you start to focus on the subgroups of growers, you find that among home and small commercial growers, heirloom tomatoes have always been popular for their outstanding taste and unusual appearance. Now, they are the stars of farmers’ markets nationwide. The downside is that most heirloom varieties are not the best producers, and they are notoriously susceptible to just about every tomato disease in the book.

Most hybrid tomato varieties, on the other hand, are prolific producers of tomatoes that often taste good and carry resistance to a range of diseases.

You can probably see where this is leading. What would happen if you grafted the scion (top) of an heirloom tomato to the rootstock of a variety with wide disease resistance? The answer, it turns out, is that you get a plant which retains the heirloom’s best quality – taste – and which gains the hybrid’s vigor and disease resistance. Yes, it really works.

This is not news to thousands of commercial growers in Asia and Europe, who have been grafting tomatoes for decades, or longer in some cases. I am told that in Japan just about every tomato in stores comes from grafted plants. But in the U.S., tomato grafting has been practiced by a relatively small number of greenhouse and hydroponic growers.

While I do not believe that any growers, here or overseas, have tried to keep this as a secret technique, grafting vegetables of any species has a kind of mystique that has led many American growers to shy away from it. Grafting is widely practiced on trees, but even there the average gardener regards it as a sort of magic trick akin to alchemy. ’Tain’t so.

Last year I started experimenting, grafting tomato varieties together. I cut the tops off dozens of seedlings – I have to admit this felt like infanticide, my babies! – switched them around, and joined them to each other’s rootstocks. These were all of the same variety, but Glory Hallelujah, most of the time it worked, and I was at least as surprised as the plants must have been.

Then I tried grafting different varieties together. Heirlooms to hybrids, hybrids to heirlooms, cherry types to plums, red ones to green ones, and on and on. As the season passed, it became clear that the heirloom-scion-to-hybrid-rootstock graft produced good results. I was not pedantic about my record-keeping (let’s face it, all my notes fit on one page) but I did label each plant so I could see which varieties it consisted of. The results were pretty exciting.

The next discovery was that there are commercially-available rootstocks, which can be grown from remarkably expensive seed, that offer resistance to just about every common tomato disease. Reading papers by grad students and professors indicated that the full spectrum of disease resistance is, indeed, passed to the scion, and that the vigorous rootstock almost doubles productivity. An extra bonus is that nutrient uptake is improved, too. (They all kept perfect records, no doubt. That’s why they are grad students and professors, and I am not.)

Even so, everyone’s focus has been on plants for greenhouse or hydroponic culture. These plants are the queens of vegetabledom, living pampered lives in protected environments. What I am trying to do this year is produce grafted tomatoes that will survive in the field, the wild outdoors, where diseases are only one of their challenges.

If it works, it won’t wow high-school kids, and it won’t make me rich and famous. But it will be a lot of fun. That’s what pushing the envelope is all about.