Grafting cucurbits

Grafting is a technique used by commercial growers of cucumber and watermelon to manage soil born disease and increase yield. Squash (black seed pumpkin or shark fin squash) and bottle gourd are used as the rootstocks for cucumber and melon scions. There are three major grafting methods: splicing, hole insertion or approach grafting, each has its pros and cons. Here the link to a podcast from OSU that's very informative.
https://www.planthealthexchange.org/cucurbits/Pages/GROW-CUC-06-20-003.aspx

Has anyone tried grafting cucurbits with success? Or have some favorite videos to recommend? Come and share in this thread.

Here's my own. My cucumbers and watermelon did poorly last year and I had a great harvest for squashes. The cucumbers seemed to have weaker roots that didn't grow well in cold spring soil and missed the optimal growing season. On the contrary, a few volunteer pumpkin seedlings came up super early, grew vigorously and started producing as early as June. So grafting cucumber to squash rootstock seems to be the way to have strong and healthy cucumber plants.

Commercial growers use some specific squash varieties for grafting purpose but I want to try out several squashes that did well in my garden: rampicante squash, field pumpkin, galeux d'eysines and bottle gourd. I'd say if one has landrace squash seeds they'd made the perfect rootstocks too.

Since it takes 7 to 14 days for scion and rootstock to be ready, plus 5-7 days for healing, I need to plan ahead. So far I practiced grafting of jibai cucumber on the rampicante squash by the hole insertion method and the plant is healing alright inside a ziplock bag. I will follow up with the results.

Growing season is coming up in northern hemisphere. Hopefully this thread will be timely for anyone who wants to give it a try.

I saw a YouTube video about those super expensive black watermelons in Japan that they auction off, and noticed one of the workers doing a graft on a seedling.  I've never seen a reference to grafting curcurbits before, and didn't even know it was done.  Interesting though.

This technique seems to be widely used commercially for melons and cucumbers in Asia and they use special rootstocks as the scion varieties tend to have weak root systems.

All mine experiments failed in the end. The squashes I used for rootstocks had hollow stems. It was like trying to fuse a 1/2" pipe into a 1" pipe and it didn't work out. It's easier just to broadcast a bunch of seeds and keep the strongest one.