Weekly update on my grafts. This is three weeks today since I made the grafts. Interesting note, I put four Asian pears and four European pears on this tree. Three of the European pears and the lanti jujulie( forgive my spelling) were very slow to start to push leaves out. Three of the Asian pears and the bartlet pear have shown the most growth. The second photo is an Asian pear, the first is a European pear.
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Those look great!
I have pear varieties that leaf out weeks after the others. They seem to vary a lot.
I also have 4 varieties of Euro pears grafted to my Asian pear. So far I don’t see any difference in growth.
How did I miss this thread until now! Thanks for sharing, Derby, especially for all the photo updates. It’s a fun project to get to see and hear about.
I’ve thought about undertaking a similar project with a similar size apple tree that was on my place when I moved here 8 years ago that has hardly made a crop in those 8 years (and what fruit it has made has been about worthless.)
Olpea, you seem to have suggested as an alternative to bark grafting letting the tree grow for a year and then grafting onto to the sprouts that grow from the major cuts. Do you think that’s a better way to go (apart from having to wait a year)?
In my case, I’m not going to graft until next year anyway. Could I go ahead and make all my big cuts now?
Thanks Bear, I think that at least one graft of each varity looks good. I only had one complete failure. When I was wrapping the tape tightly around the limb, I got it too high and caught the scion and heard an audible snap when it broke down in the bark graft. I am really excited to have made it to this point. It would not have been possible without the help from the kind community here. This is my first success( fingers crossed) in grafting. My first attempt was over thirty years ago , I tried to graft an apple onto buck brush. Ha ha. The bark kind of looked the same to me. I was a funny kid😜.
Cousin, I am glad u found this thread. I hope my little project is of some value to u.
Looks good- you may even get to try some fruit next year. Looking at my pear grafts from last spring, at least 4 of the 7 on mature trees have flowers. And my trees are far less mature than yours (4th leaf).
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Update. I thought I would post a final update on this thread with a few pics to show how the grafts r growing. I would like to thank everyone for their advice and experience that made this possible. Only a group of fruit growers like this can understand the feeling you get from seeing your own grafts growing. Thank you Tony for the scions, they r really starting to take off. In all I have thirteen of sixteen grafts take with at least one of each varity.
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Jason
Just remember to splint those grafts. One strong wind then game over. Bark graft will give you 98% take but the callous tend to be a little weak. I loss a few good grafts and felt sick over it. I just grafeed harvest Queen to my ever going multi grafted pear tree thanks to TFB. In about four years your tree going to look similar to mine with hundred of pounds of pears.
Tony
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Those look great. Congrats
Thanks speedster, I checked them twice a day for three weeks, I still can’t believe how good it turned out.
Tony, thanks for the advice, I agree they r getting to the point that I need to consider support, but that’s a good problem to have!!!
I looked at some splinting ideas yesterday. I understand that this has many factors involved but this is may first and you can see the size of some of the grafts, how long could they potentially grow this year ? Just for an idea of the amount of support they may need.
If you have a large understock Like yours, some grafts can grow up to 3 .5 feet.
Tony
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Noted.
I just went back and looked at your previous updated photos and it appears that you got tons of growth between weeks 3-4. Your 3 weeks photos showed around an inch or less of growth but now they are growing like gang busters. I’m hoping mine does the same thing. The growth from my rind grafts are definately ahead of the whip grafts. Mine are exactly 3 weeks old today and they are showing about a half inch of green. I think I grafted earlier than you though when the tree itself was just starting to push buds. Hoping to see them really take off now. All of the woodland trees are starting to fill in right now. Should be all green within a Week.
It looks like we are about the same zone speedster. When I put the grafts on, the tree was almost leafed out. This pear always leafed out super early, about ten days before other local pears. We had a week of pretty warm weather, then two weeks of cool weather, this last week has been a little warmer. I don’t know if the weather helped but you are right, they have really grown in the last week.
We had thunder storms here today. My pear grafts are three feet long now. It makes me nervous to have so much wind and rain. I have put up supports but they have out grown them . I will have to go check them as soon as I get home today. Maybe I need to summer prune ?
I do hope I can do similar thing on my 14 years flowering pear tree, it looks so attempting, but I have no experience at grafting at all.
Go for it, James! It’s not rocket science…just simple carpentry - and pears are THE most forgiving of beginners’ often less-than-perfect attempts.
We joke - but it’s not much of an exaggeration - that you can just throw scions at a pear, and they’ll ‘take’, or, that if you get pear scions and rootstock together in the same room, that you’re assured of success…
Several years back, I showed one of my coworkers how to graft, gave her a grafting knife, a bundle of a half-dozen pear varieties and some budding rubbers, and turned her loose on the Bradford pear in her back yard.
She got very good success rates, and it produced pears for several years… before it self-destructed like most all Bradfords do…
We’re into summer budding season now - you could probably do a bunch of T-buds and either force them this summer, or leave them parked 'til next spring.
Yes James , lucky is right on this! This was my first attempt at pear grafting and it went extremely well. I was very pleased with the results and with the help of the nice folks here I had successfull pear, Apple, and peach grafts using materials I just had on hand. It really changes how you look at fruit trees. You see one at an old home place and wounder if it is an old forgotten varrity you could bring back home and add to your tree. I think that is why people on this site debate their favorite verities, they have so many to choose from .
I checked my grafts today when I got home from work and I was releaved to see they had all made it through the storm. I may need to do some work on my supports tomorrow. When I was typing this up today I was trying to estimate how much growth my grafts had put on this season. I decided to get my wife’s sewing tape and take some measurements. My peach graft is the shortest but it was also the last to be grafted, 19 inches. My fugi Apple on a seedling rootstock is 23 inches ( the measurements include the scion which was about 4 inches) . On my pear I measured the graft with the most growth , 50 inches. A side note on the pears , I find the Asian pears have out grown the European pears in length and in leaf size except for the lanti jujuli which has grown much more like a European pear.
This is exactly what I do.
Sometimes rather than sticking to the main street going through town I intentionally take back alleys just to get a look inside the yards of old homes. It’s amazing the number of big old neglected fruit trees (almost all apple or pear) you see. In most cases the person who planted them are long gone now as most of the former homes are now college rentals for the nearby university.
Thanks for the encouragement, I will try it next spring. Derby, what’s the material you used for grafting? I will prepare them and I assume you used bark grafting.