First time grafter here as well. Did 3 apple grafts to rootstocks. Looks like 2 have taken so far. I’m extremely excited about it. Appleseed70 sent me some Honeycrisp scions with nice swollen buds, and they seemed to take the fastest on my growing rootstock…like less than 2 weeks, and the bud broke showing lots of green. My biggest lesson so far is that growing rootstock is best.
Good luck with them Ed. Post some photos of the successes and failures…if any.
Muddy, lots of wine maybe? I have to get them to survive first. I had a block of 120 tart cherries I planted last year. All 100 of my montmorency trees on ct500 rootstock winter killed. I should have went with standard mahaleb in the first place.
100 trees winter killed, man…I’d need therapy over that. I’m more of a stick with the tried and true kind of guy for that reason.
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A setback… I grafted lots of different stone fruits to my peach, and the plums and pluots have grown the most vigorously. But suddenly one of them (a mirabelle graft) that had branched out significantly just died–no blackening or discoloration, just wilting and drying up, within the space of two days. Now another one near to it is wilting, and this one was doing even better, three branches at about 8-10 inches each. I feel helpless, because it looks like it will die as well. Since the other one was already dead I unwrapped the graft to see what was going on, and it was all sticky and oozy with darkish sap. Is this a case of peach canker getting into my grafts, does anyone know? Is there anything I can do other than watch grafts die? 
It does sound like canker, but I have never seen that myself – odd. Did you have the graft bases well-sealed? I use Doc Farewells to give a complete seal. Any exposed wood is a potential path for disease. It might be late to do anything about it for this year but you might want to paint them next year. Parafilm coverage can also work but its hard to get it complete on a large stock.
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Hmm, I thought they were well sealed, but who knows? The parafilm tends to disintegrate after a short while in the heat. Also maybe there is enough of the canker spore around here that it got in before I even wrapped the graft. My other peach tree has canker, I’m just learning that now. I’ll definitely paint the grafts next year. I think I know what may have happened. One of the peach scions I grafted on to the tree started leaking sap from the tip pretty early on (even though the graft took), and I thought maybe some types of twigs just leak more sap. Now that I’ve read up on canker online, I’m thinking maybe the scion had canker pretty badly. And it’s right near the one that died, and we’ve had a couple of rains in the last month, as well as wind, so perhaps it could have spread from the infected scion over to the other two–only a matter of inches away, and downwind. The one is definitely dead, the other has not declined so quickly so I’m hoping it will pull through. I wonder if I should remove ALL the possibly affected grafts or if I might leave them to see if they manage to overcome the canker.
Finally today,May 30, tiny green tip showing. Same with Claygate, three buds are greening at the joint between 1 and 2 year wood. Not the best scion but it was all I could get. BTW, what’s your opinion of Claygate pearmain?
Lizzy
On the Whip and tongue graft, I push mine deep and it makes an ugly graft with the end pieces having gone too far. Time in open air is a factor in success, so I do the angled cuts and do not worry about how well they match then do the tongue cut and press together. I make sure one side lines up as much as possible, and take the other side however it turns out. I press till it is tight. I get near 100% takes this way.
The saddle graft Stephen Hayes uses has not been a high success rate for me. I don’t use it any more. I do some cleft grafts. I wrap with parafilm and then rubber band. On the occasional ones that I forget to rubber band all have done the same or maybe even better.
My preferred timing is to plant the rootstocks when they arrive and graft when it has started to open buds. I have grafted when buds are starting to peek open on the scion and get those to take also. I cut my scions so there are never more then 3 buds, some only one. It keeps the leverage and target size down for birds, cats, toys etc.
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good info, @cckw. I guess I will stop worrying about the incredible ugliness of my whip and tongue grafts. What matters is that they took!
Lizzy, I made some incredibly ugly w&t’s too, but some of them are just right. I think that what happened on my funky ones is that I pushed the pieces too far.
When w&t work best for me is under these conditions- stock and scion close in size, wood supple and wet, slant of the cut pretty average, maybe a little on the long-slopey side.Then, after the two pieces are already a pretty good match, cut a tongue on each but it’s not a very big tongue, just a little bit of a spare hand to help hold things together. Once the cabium layers are touching you don’t need to push the scion harder into the stock. At that point it’s time for the wrapping and sealing.
I really liked this little video, and even got used to the music by the end.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=leCTeLp2hu0
:- )M
Thanks, @marknmt! I was definitely overdoing the tongue. Good video, But yeah, that is about the weirdest combination of different background music tracks I have ever experienced! At first it’s all, uh, Bavarian disco…? then it just gets weirder…
Okay, I can report a major mistake! I did my first grafts on my apple tree, and tried using just parafilm and that green plastic garden tape (NOT sticky) stuff on the first seven grafts. I then switched to electrical tape. Those first grafts all took, but a couple months ago we had high winds and one broke off. I realized the green garden tape didn’t offer enough support to the graft (duh) so guess what I did? I wrapped them all tightly with electrical tape. WITHOUT TAKING OFF THE GREEN GARDEN TAPE. So two days ago I noticed that on those grafts the lumps under the electrical tape were very peculiar. I took off the e. tape and sure enough, the green garden tape was throttling the grafts. There was a LOT of soft callusing, I guess the tree was attempting to reconnect over the girdle of tape. I guess if I’d left it, that might have eventually happened. I had to do surgery to get the garden tape out–and on one I even had to leave half a ring of it, but in that case I think the callus HAD managed to grow over the tape so it shouldn’t be a problem with half of it still there. Then since there was such a deep groove where the garden tape had been, and such raw-looking callus material, I re-parafilmed them and then taped on bamboo skewers to support them in the wind. Keeping my fingers crossed. The graft growth had looked pretty good despite these problems, but not as vigorous as some of the others. Dumb mistake! Oh well…
I’m finally letting Bob Vance and cckw know that the scions they sent this spring are growing. I have 6 varieties on this little Braeburn tree.
One scion went on a small Eve apple and a Fireside & Elstar I put on some crab apple whips. And I had extra scions to share with 2 of my kids, so they have different apples growing too. I used the saddle graft and it worked well for me, although I read later that they weren’t real sturdy. Many years ago I did some bud grafts onto crab apples, but I haven’t had much luck since then. I think learning here has helped a lot. You will notice about half way up on the left side, above the blue tag is a scion that lookes like it isn’t growing. A couple of weeks ago it decided to grow, not much growth, but looks healthy. Further up is one that didn’t grow, it shriveled up.
I do have a question about the saddle grafts. I don’t plan on letting any apples grow next year if they bloomed, but would two years growth be enough or do grafts need more time to make enough size? Or is this one of those "it just depends on how well they grow " answers?
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Hi Lizzy. This was my first season to use parafilm. After reading about others concerns I decided to graft several with just parafilm and several with parafilm/electrical tape over wrap. My conclusion was that parafilm can work but sometimes the graft needs support longer than the wax will last. I was hoping that I could wrap with parafilm and not have to return for the removal. Going forward my grafts will have electrical tape over the parafilm even though I have to come back and remove it. Bill
That’s about what I’m thinking too, @Auburn-- They need more support than just parafilm, but that green garden plastic tape/tie is not good support, and it eventually girdles. Best to use electrical tape. I’m a convert!
@tessie5, I’m curious also what more experienced people will say about how long you should let the grafts strengthen before you let them fruit. I was just going to let my grafts from this last spring fruit next year if they are so inclined–but maybe that’s foolish. At least with the apple grafts, most of them have thickened up enough that I wouldn’t worry. But our growing season is probably longer where I am in California, so maybe mine are thicker after one summer than yours will be…
Just a follow up on the flowery grafts issue—the peach and nectarine scions that only made flowers never did sprout any leaves, and after they were done flowering they died. Going forward I’d like to be able to tell if a scion has only flowers on it so that I won’t waste time grafting it. But I thought that buds on peaches always had both flowers and leaves. I guess I’d better figure that out! Maybe when they put all their effort into the flowers, the leaf part of the buds never develop…
I hope @Lizzy won’t mind that I resurrected this thread to ask my own question. But its such a simple question I hated to start a whole thread, and it is one I’m sure some other first time grafters will wonder at some point. :
I cut most of my scion wood more than a month ago when it was 100% completely dormant. But I forgot to collect wood from one european pear tree and I now want to try and collect some wood from it and immediately graft it onto another pear tree (the “rootstock” tree is about 5 ft tall and is 2 years old if that matters- I’m going to graft onto one of the top limbs of it) Anyway, here is my question…
Since I’ve waited until now, the tree I want to collect my scion wood from is not 100% dormant any more (at least I don’t think it would be defined at totally dormant). It certainly DOES NOT have any leaves, not even any tiny leaf tips are poking out. However, the buds have swollen up a lot and are very green looking. I’m not sure I’m doing a good job explaining the state of the scion tree and its important. Basically, it just has big, fat green buds on it that it didn’t have when fully dormant. I would say the very, very tips of actual leaves could poke out from the buds in just a few days, but probably not today or tomorrow.
So my question is, am I too late to use this as scion wood. Remember, I won’t be cutting it and putting it in the fridge this time. I just want to cut off some scion wood and immediately walk over to the tree I’m grafting to and attach it within 15 minutes of collecting it.
The “root stock” tree is at just about exactly the same stage as the scion tree, or maybe even a day or two ahead. The tiny leaf tips could poke out of its big, green, swollen buds any time now.
SO what say you, folks? Thank-you.
Kevin
I say give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, you can always try again next year. But maybe hunt around for a branch that has less swollen buds.
I agree with the “what do I have to loose” philosophy and therefore had already planned to do at least a couple. But I’m considering grafting a BUNCH of small Bradford pears at a BUNCH of different places on each tree. I’m so new at grafting and try so hard to do it correctly that it takes A LOT of work for me. SO even though I’m going to do a few for the exact reason you mention (nothing to loose), I don’t want to go all out if you all tell me 100% sure that swollen, green buds on scion (or rootstock) would definitely doom them to fail. So even if no one is certain, I’m interested in hearing if you think it is EXTREMELY likely to fail or very likely to succeed or whatever. So even if people here can’t give me a simple yes or no answer, I’m interested in everyone’s thoughts on the LIKELIHOOD of success/failure. Thanks, all.