One issue i have with budding…is depending on the time, to find that thinner wood, sometimes you need to bud higher then you might want. So i’ve got a number of buds growing out that are way too high for me, but i’m stuck. One nice thing about container trees, is that i can bud much lower. I suppose if you plant ahead, you could whack back the area you want to bud early in the season, get that new growth to come out and by July you should have plenty of wood to chose from.
@fruitnut advocates budding on branches which already have good angles rather than the main trunk. I kept that advise in mind this year. You can bend that branch much more then.
Thanks, Mark. I am very pleased with the results of some of these interventions. I had way too many 40 years + trees of the same water pear. I believe its Lawson. Its quite good but doesn’t keep well and they give more than we can eat in a few weeks. So i changed some of them to other varieties.
You are so right. Unfortunately i had a health problem and my orchard had to take a back seat. Some things got way out of hand (like removing weeds) and grafts of vigorous varieties where one of them. Nothing we can’t fix a year later with some heavy pruning though.
Glad to see it took. Did you just graft it recently? If you did it in spring, that was a long time for it to stay dormant.
Here’s a pic of a Kokuso I grafted on 4/25 onto my Geraldi. It has put on a lot of growth and really ripped through the tape holding the graft. And yes, the leaves are huge!
That was an extreme case, but I’ve had quite a few grafts start to rip through the Templex tape. At least I don’t need to remember to go around and remove it like the green garden tape I used last year (and still find a few I forgot to remove).
Here’s a closeup of an apple graft which started to rip through the tape. I helped it along some to get a good look at the union. I think there were only two buds on the scion and both have grown at least a foot.
I did notice a problem with one of the plum grafts- maybe ripping through the tape was a bit of a stress for it, as it leaked sap. When I felt it, it was dried and hard, so I think that it may be OK. Kahinta graft from 5/4:
They both have to callus to form a union. But I’d agree the stock should do the major lifting. It has unlimited water, nutrients, and carbs, the main ingredients of callus. At least compared to the scion which is running on fumes.
Yes, I grafted it a week or two ago. I had a huge 3-year old volunteer mulberry bush the birds must have deposited. Caliper an inch thick. I flush cut the bush at its base and applied two rind grafts. I wrapped it crazy tight with an endless amount of electrician’s tape. The understock was leaking a ton of sap as I was grafting. I wrapped from the bottom up, and the sap was welling up and pooled in the center of the cut end between the rind grafts as I was wrapping. I wrapped around everything, then applied sealant on the tips of the scions. Even still, the sap was leaking through the tape! So the cut-ends of the scions were flooded with sap to-become callous tissue.
Can mulberry be killed ? We have them come up all over and i swear i’ve cut down the same tree (flush with the ground) yearly for 10 years.
I get volunteer black walnuts everywhere. I’ve actually got one going on maybe 4 years (i just left it for some shade–they grow super fast) and it has 4 nuts growing. I think mulberries from seed fruit quickly.
They also seem to be about the easiest things to graft. Not only did all of my mulberry grafts take, the grafts are growing as vigorously as the shoots I left on the stock.
I have a three foot mulberry bush that I paid for that is probably nothing special. To balance it, I have a six foot mulberry bush growing up between the gas lines of my AC unit that I cut to the ground twice or more a year that I can’t seem to get rid of. I may need to break down this year and try to use a poison soak on the stump once I cut it again. All I can informally say is that I am given the impression that mulberry loves to be coppiced.
? We have them come up all over and i swear i’ve cut down the same tree (flush with the ground) yearly for 10 years.