5 Best Tomato Grafting Clips for Beginners

You’ve spent weeks nurturing your prized heirloom tomato seedlings, only to watch them succumb to blight or wilt by mid-summer. It’s a frustrating cycle many of us know too well. Grafting offers a powerful solution, letting you combine the incredible flavor of your favorite heirlooms with the rugged, disease-resistant roots of a hybrid powerhouse. This guide will walk you through the best grafting clips for beginners, helping you choose the right tool to make your first year of grafting a success.

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Why Graft Tomatoes: A Beginner’s Overview

Grafting is essentially plant surgery. You take the top part of a flavorful but disease-prone plant (the scion) and attach it to the super-strong root system of a disease-resistant variety (the rootstock). The grafting clip is the stitch that holds them together while they heal into a single, bionic plant.

Think of it as an insurance policy for your harvest. That Black Krim that always gets fusarium wilt? Graft it onto a rootstock like ‘Maxifort’ or ‘Estamino’, and you give it a fighting chance to thrive all season long. You’re not just preventing disease; you’re often creating a more vigorous plant that can handle drought, temperature swings, and less-than-perfect soil with greater ease.

For the hobby farmer, this isn’t about chasing commercial-level yields. It’s about reliability. It’s about ensuring you actually get to eat the fruits of your labor, especially when you have limited space and can’t afford to lose half your crop. The small effort of grafting pays huge dividends in resilience and peace of mind.

Johnny’s Silicone Clips for Gentle Stem Support

When you’re first learning to graft, your biggest fear is crushing the delicate stems of your seedlings. Johnny’s Selected Seeds offers a popular line of soft, flexible silicone clips that are incredibly forgiving for beginners. Their pliable nature provides a gentle but secure hug around the graft union.

These clips are ideal for the angled "splice graft" that many beginners start with. Because they are so soft, they conform easily to the stems, reducing the risk of damage if your hands are a little shaky. They also feature a small air hole, which helps prevent moisture from getting trapped and causing rot at the graft site.

The main tradeoff is pressure. If your cuts aren’t perfectly flush, a soft silicone clip might not provide enough force to press the two halves together for a perfect union. However, their reusability is a major plus. A quick wash in a sanitizing solution, and they’re ready for next season, making them a great long-term investment for a small-scale operation.

Grower’s Solution Spring Clips for Firm Pressure

If silicone clips are a gentle hug, spring clips are a firm handshake. These small, spring-loaded plastic clips provide consistent and reliable pressure on the graft union. This is their single biggest advantage. The spring ensures the cambium layers of the scion and rootstock are held in constant contact, which can significantly increase your success rate.

This firm pressure makes them a fantastic choice once you’ve gotten the hang of making clean, straight cuts. You don’t have to worry if the pressure is "just right"—the spring does the work for you. This consistency is a huge confidence booster.

However, that strength is also their potential downside. For very thin or leggy seedlings, the pressure can be too much and may crush the stem’s vascular tissue. You need to match the clip size to your seedlings carefully. They are best suited for plants with sturdy, pencil-lead-thick stems.

Top-Hat Style Clips for Thicker Rootstock Stems

You’ll inevitably run into a common grafting problem: your rootstock seedling grew faster and thicker than your scion seedling. Trying to join two stems of different diameters with a standard clip is a recipe for failure. This is exactly where top-hat style clips save the day.

These clever two-piece clips have a base that cradles the thicker rootstock stem and a separate "hat" that securely holds the thinner scion. This design forces the two cut surfaces into perfect alignment, something that’s nearly impossible with a one-piece clip on mismatched stems. They are a specialized tool for a very common situation.

Applying them can be a bit more fiddly than a simple clip, often requiring two hands to seat both stems properly. But for solving the mismatched-stem dilemma, they are absolutely invaluable. Having a few of these on hand can rescue grafts you might otherwise have to discard.

Clear Silicone Tubes for Delicate Stem Grafting

For the most delicate of operations, sometimes a clip isn’t the answer at all. Clear silicone tubes, which are essentially short, slit pieces of tubing, offer 360-degree support with no single pressure point. They are the ultimate tool for grafting very young tomato seedlings or even smaller plants like peppers and eggplants.

Their main advantage is gentleness. You simply slide the tube over the graft union, and its natural tension holds the plant together. Because the tube is clear, you get a perfect view of the healing process. You can watch for a successful union or spot problems early without ever disturbing the plant.

The technique takes a bit of practice. It’s often easiest to slide the tube onto the rootstock before making the final cut and attaching the scion. While it requires a steady hand, the ability to visually monitor the graft is a massive benefit for any beginner wanting to understand the healing process up close.

Quick-Release Spring Clips for Easy Removal

You’ve done everything right. The graft has healed for 10 days in your humidity dome, and the plant looks fantastic. The final step is removing the clip—and this is a surprisingly easy place to ruin your hard work. Fumbling with a tight clip and snapping a perfectly healed graft is a truly heartbreaking moment.

Quick-release spring clips are designed to prevent this exact scenario. They function like a standard spring clip but include a small tab or an ergonomic design that makes them easy to pinch open and remove with minimal force. This simple feature dramatically reduces the risk of damaging the plant during the final step.

While they might cost a fraction more than their standard counterparts, the value is immense for a beginner. The confidence of knowing you can remove the clip safely and easily is well worth it. When you’re just starting, you want to eliminate as many potential points of failure as possible, and this is a big one.

Choosing the Right Clip Size for Your Seedlings

You can have the best clip in the world, but if it’s the wrong size, it’s useless. The single most important factor in choosing a clip is matching its diameter to the diameter of your seedling stems. Too loose, and the graft won’t make contact. Too tight, and you’ll strangle the plant.

Grafting clips are typically sold in millimeter sizes, such as 1.5mm, 2.0mm, and 2.5mm. It’s nearly impossible to eyeball this. The best approach for your first year is to buy a variety pack that includes multiple sizes. This allows you to find the perfect fit for your specific seedlings without any guesswork.

For a more precise measurement, you can compare your seedling stems to the shanks of drill bits of a known size. A 2.0mm clip should fit a stem that’s about the same thickness as a 2.0mm (or 5/64") drill bit. The goal is a snug fit that holds the union securely without pinching it. A variety pack is your best friend until you get a feel for what size your preferred varieties typically produce.

Post-Grafting Care for High Success Rates

The grafting clip is just the tool that holds the patient together during surgery; the healing chamber is the recovery room where success actually happens. A perfect graft will fail every time without the right aftercare. Your primary goal is to prevent the scion from wilting and dying before it can fuse with the rootstock.

To do this, you need a "healing chamber," which can be as simple as a clear plastic storage tote with a lid. For the first 3 to 4 days, your grafted plants need three things:

• 100% Humidity: Mist the inside of the tote and seal the lid. This stops the leaves of the scion from losing moisture.
• Total Darkness: Place the tote in a dark room or cover it with a blanket. The plant needs to focus all its energy on healing the wound, not on photosynthesis.
• Warmth: Keep the chamber at a stable room temperature, away from drafts.

After the initial healing period, you begin the hardening-off process. Over the next 7 to 10 days, you will gradually introduce light and decrease humidity. Start by cracking the lid for an hour, then two, and slowly move the chamber into a dimly lit area. Rushing this step will shock the plant. Patience in this final phase is what truly ensures your first-year grafting success.

Choosing the right grafting clip removes a major variable, setting you up for a successful experience from the start. Remember that the clip is part of a system—pair your chosen tool with careful technique and a proper healing environment. Don’t be afraid to experiment; every graft you attempt, successful or not, is a lesson learned on the path to a more resilient and productive garden.