After the coldest, wettest spring on record - and a delayed graft attempt - I find today (19 June) one Lamb Abbey Pearmain and two Connell Red grafts show life!
The other stick in the Redfield cleft graft (on Gen202) is also showing life. That will help to heal the wound so much faster.
Makes a banner year for grafting here:
Two Connell Red
Three Goldrush
One each of Keepsake,
Court Pendu Rose
Winekist
Lamb Abbey Pearmain
I know, some of you made hundreds of grafts of scores of cultivars. Am glad for you. but with my limited space and goals, this is a big deal.
Here in Northern IL nothing has been predictable this year. Two and three month old grafts are coming to life while others may have popped (on the same tree for example) 4-5 weeks ago. Same cultivar, same large field rootstock they were attached to on the same day… results are across the board.
Persimmons are growing like gangbusters on field stock:
@BobVance Harrow Sweet pear. Thank you. Work of my friend. Partial name on tag. Lightly pressed pencil work. Tag will be lost within 1-yr. almost guaranteed. He’s a champ.
Here’s my late-season bench graft, using dormant M111 that had been in the fridge for two months and scion wood from a Mississippi seedling apple named Umfress, which had been in the fridge for four months. I did the graft on June 17, only eight days ago.
Here’s another Mississippi apple, the Captain Davis. Same storage conditions and grafting date as above.
I learned something this year, maybe not new to most well established grafters but new to me. I had a scion of Smokehouse worked onto a Sask. Prairie Sun apple last year. In the summer it grew to about three feet long and this spring it never leafed out yet the branch looked alive. All my other Smokehouse in the yard had leafed out, the tree this one was grafted to had flowered and set fruit, still no growth from the Smokehouse scion, so I cut it back by 1/2 and lo and behold a week later the buds woke up and started to push. Not sure if they would have anyway, but it is something for me to think about next year.
I grafted to new rootstocks, most of which I first potted and grafted to after leaves started pushing. Mostly splice & cleft grafts, but also some side grafts on peaches
Apricots: 2/12 - 17%
Peaches/Nectarines: 10/34 - 29%
Cherries: 15/25 - 60%
Plums: 9/11 - 82%
Apples: 39/42 - 93%
Pears: 3/3 - 100%
My previous grafting instruction had been to just wrap graft with parafilm, but the expertise of this forum taught me to wrap with stronger tape. I used electricians tape over parafilm, and noticed higher percentages of takes compared to last year. I also started wrapping scion with parafilm on peaches, apricots, & cherries and some others, but had some buds die after getting hung up in the parafilm. After seeing that I slit parafilm after the buds started waking up, but found that to be dangerous and killed a lot of peaches and cherries when the sudden change in humidity (?) did in the developing bud. After deciding that was a bad technique, I ended up dipping in wax melted in hot water in an insulated mug as suggested on this forum, and that worked really well. Thanks, helpful wise people.
Last summer I “parked” four apple scion on a mountain ash tree in my yard. They looked happy for the summer, and I was able to get some bud grafts from them later, but none on the mountain ash survived the winter. This spring I parked a couple pears on the same tree, and they are slowly coming to life. I expect they’ll probably be winter casualties also.
That’s good to know, as I’m about to mess with some bud grafts in the same way. For the earlier batch, I cut parafilm on all 25 of the cherries, and most did grow fine. I tried that on about 5 peaches which were looking promising, and they all died. The later peach grafts which I waxed had a higher incidence of continued growth if they started at all. My sample sizes are small, and I’m just guessing at interpretations as I’m new at this whole grafting thing.
