This month-old “Jade” avocado graft says “LET’S GO!”
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My first attempt at T-Budding. I took a bud off this rootstock and tried to insert it on another part of a tree to see if it will take. I have a few failed rootstocks from this year I would like to graft into this summer. Any suggestions with t-budding
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Best advice I can give you is to make sure that the tree is well watered so the bark slips easily for bud grafting
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My first attempts of whip and tongue grafting seem to have worked nicely. Next time, I’ll try and reduce the “lip” where I left the material too long. The upper 2 pictures are Annie Elizabeth on M26, the lower picture Kaiser Alexander (bosc) on seedling.
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Congratulations. There should be no lip. Better a gap then any overlap. Also, try to cut one clean, flat plane and wrap tightly enough that all of the cut surface is in intimate contact.
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Very nice indeed, before you prune them you need to watch SkillCult’s tree training videos on YouTube it looks like one of them is almost ready to be a modified central leader just by opening the tree up and widening it at least in a bigger cage.
You didn’t leave anything too long, you pushed it together too far, you see how both sides have about equal “lip”. If anything was wrong with the cutting your tongues were to close to the middle and too short!
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I agree with @trav . It looks like your slant cuts match perfectly, but the tongue cuts were either too close to center, going straight down along the grain, or both. For best results, the tongue cut needs to start about 1/3 of the way across the stick and should be not quite parallel with the initial cut.
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@Trav … yes… i have watched Skillcults vids on apple tree pruning mult times. Will review them again before I winter prune those.
Thank you @murky, @Trav and @jcguarneri for your valuable feedback. I think you are right that the tongues were too short and too close to the middle. I cut the whips first and and then laid them against each other and then finely marked a line over them, where I wanted to cut the tongues, so I could be sure that they would fit together. This would also mean that the line was too straight. Thank you also very much for the picture, it is quite helpful.
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Follow up on a T-bud graft 15 days out. Top part looks a little brown. Any suggestions if this is normal or the start of it failing. TYIA
When you say “top part” are you talking about the leaf petiole that came with the bud? That is expected to die and fall off.
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Just reading through this thread- I realize this is old hat now. Ive been doing a bunch of oddball experimental sculpural espaliers here. Kind of fun stuff. It IS a bit slow. I was inspired initially by seeing the work of Axel Erlandson.
Ive had the most success with apples- all double worked seedlings with M26 interstems.
Mulberries are less adaptable to some of these manipulations. Where apples will spur up when branches face downward, mulberries will just abort limbs.
Its pretty amazing when the limbs start to inosculate.
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that’s so so cool! yes I’ve seen those trees and they’re incredible. I love that last apple tree you are doing
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Thanks for sharing. I’ve always wanted to try messing around with some stuff like that. Great to see real pictures, and with apple trees.
That may be a novel approach to addressing a bad crotch angle or double leader 
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30 -40 yrs from now, someone will look at your trees and ask what kind of drugs were you on. lol! cool tree art!
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When I was about 13, i lived in Scotts Valley California, where those trees were originally grafted. Erlandson had already died and his place was boarded up, but us kids used to sneak in there to look at the trees. Later they were moved. The only reason I haven’t started large scale grafting projects is that I’m planning to buy a new property and move. One of the criteria for land shopping is enough flat space to house some pretty epic grafting projects. There are species that grow super fast, especially some hybrid poplars and willows. I’ve done some weird experiments here, but nothing large scale. The most interesting thing I’ve done is a heart shaped tree, where the two sides of the heart actually point down at the top, so the sap flow has to reverse into the leader scion. I wasn’t sure it would work, but it did. I think there is huge potential to graft trees and then sell them. I’m surprised more people haven’t seen the huge potential and run with it. It is one of the projects I’m most excited about.
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there is a guy here locally that is selling grafted apples, pears and plums on facebook for $15. you pick up. they are all about 3-4’ but at that price id by them all day long. has a decent cultivar list. smart man. i may partake next year. bet if you bought a bunch, he would give a price break. hes about 40 mi. from me.
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There are possible ways to speed it up a lot. I have grafted 5 grafts, one on top of the other at once and had them all take. You could also chip bud a bunch of side branches onto one whip. I have also grafted very long scions and even small branches that were several years old onto established side branches. If one were to use my training methods https://youtu.be/lEs6sfOISvQ all of the side branches could be gotten in just a couple of years many times. Each of those could be grafted to long scions of 18 inches to 2 feet long (you have to use long splints to stabilize them). it’s hard to speed up flowering, except for using dwarf stock.
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an interesting proposition. Ive generally tended to go the other direction toward single buds even on my whip and tongues etc. since it seems like a single bud can push so much more growth than even the longest scion you might hope to use. I imagine for apples, you might get away with a single bud at the tip of a long whip, but most other species would probably resent pushing sap that far to a bud and vigor would suffer.
I often do multiple grafts to establish scaffolds immediately and/or hedge my bets on a hard won variety of a trickier species graft-wise. It can be useful to choke vigor too. Nothing worse than a new graft doing so well that it completely fails, and Id much rather divide the growth between several scaffolds of the newly grafted variety than push rootstock growth only to prune it off.
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