Grafting technology has been widely adopted in vegetable cultivation due to its numerous advantages, including enhanced stress resistance, mitigation of continuous cropping challenges, and improved resistance to soil‑borne diseases. In China, however, vegetable grafting is still predominantly performed manually, resulting in low efficiency and high labor costs. Additionally, variations in manual skill levels and the lack of standardized techniques often lead to inconsistent survival rates of grafted plants. To address these limitations, this study focuses on the development of automated clamping and cutting technologies for single watermelon seedlings grown in hole trays. A comprehensive structural design for the cutting mechanism based on the sticking method was proposed. This system enabled continuous automatic feeding of hole seedlings, precise clamping, and efficient cutting of scion wood. The clamping and cutting mechanism of the grafting machine adopted a sliding cut method. The cutting angle was determined to be 30°, with a sliding angle of approximately 46° and a cutting stroke of 14.77 mm, thereby allowing for an energy‑efficient cutting process. To prevent damage to the seedlings during clamping, a 2 mm thick polystyrene pad was incorporated on one side of the clamping claw. This pad effectively absorbed the impact force, thereby enhancing the safety and reliability of the operation. Cutting experiments were conducted using watermelon seedlings as the target material. The average success rates of clamping and cutting after clamping for watermelon scion seedlings by this institution reached 98.5% and 94.4% respectively. The system reached a grafting efficiency of 720 plants per hour, which is similar to manual grafting, thereby demonstrating its potential to replace manual labor and reduce physical workload in commercial grafting operations.