My limited understanding is that the best way to graft onto larger rootstocks, particularly in order to prevent the rootstock from dying back faster than the scion can grow and heal over the wound, is to graft more than one scion onto the same stem and then eventually prune back to a single stem. My question is how exactly to get from two (or three) scions grafted onto a single stem of a rootstock back to just one grafted stem.
Here are some picture of three persimmons I grafted, the first two last year, and the other one (the one with three scions) the year before. I’m not really sure what to do with them now.
Here are two pictures of the first tree. There’s still quite a bit of cut stem that the scion hasn’t grown over yet.
With this second tree I used two different varieties for the two scions, because I wasn’t sure if the scion I had for one variety was any good, so I grafted a different variety on the other side, but it turns out they both took. Unfortunately, the variety I would have chosen to keep didn’t grow as well as the variety I’d most like to keep. Should I have pruned the other variety back sooner to slow it down? I guess at this point I should just graft the variety I would have chosen somewhere else and let the larger stem take over this tree.
This third tree is a year older and I grafted three scions on it. It still hasn’t healed over completely, but the stem is probably 2" in diameter where I cut it.