An update and another friendly reminder: learn to bud! I “resurrected” this graft by salvaging a couple of dormant buds from the new growth from the broken pear scion and t-budding them right back onto the same callery stock. Both took, and after a few weeks I forced the topmost, which grew a couple of feet before the season ended.
Two great t-budding tutorials:
I did a number of other t-buds last summer with a high success rate. Not hard to learn, and a very useful skill to have.
2 years ago i added a brookcot apricot to my black ice plum. it took and put on 2ft. of growth. it had 4 pink blooms on it this spring but they didnt set. going to graft another apricot next spring that blooms at the same time for pollination. i also have a canadian plum grafted . for some reason black ice was covered with blooms also but didnt set either. likely to much N from the goat bedding it put around it. its growing gangbusters!
I didn’t have much graft wood from my Canada plum as it was still a small tree, so instead I added chip buds to a bunch of different plum trees in August 2023. For some reason though, not one of the chip bud grafts would grow for me, (most other chip buds were successful). Luckily my Canada plum tree sent up suckers which I harvested, so I now have some smaller Canada plum trees growing. I’m mostly just growing them for root stock and for pollienizing my hybrid plums.
I see Canadian and American plums often recommended to pollinate hybrid plums. However, I’m not sure how that is supposed to work when the Canada plums seems to bloom 10 days to 2 weeks later than most of my hybrid plums.
I’m considering keeping a few Canada plum trees in smaller containers inside for the winter after they’ve gone dormant. I figure if I put them in a heated room with sun in January, perhaps I can induce them to bloom earlier and hopefully get their bloom to coincide with my early hybrid plums. To me they seem to bloom too late to be very helpful for pollinating my hybrids.
It took about 3-4 years, but at least now my original Canada plum is starting to throw up root suckers quite readily. I like this as I want to have black knot resistant volunteers I can use as root stock. I want to use hybrid and Canada plum trees as the base tree for top working. That way I figure that the worst that can happen is I might lose some grafted upper branches to black knot, but I shouldn’t have to worry about losing the entire tree.
I grafted Canadian plum at the same time as the apricot yet the Canadian plum didn’t flower despite it growing 2xs longer than the apricot did. brookcot apricot flowered 2 weeks before black ice did.
Grafting Update for Winter Banana (Starting to think it’s a Gold Rush 
)& King David.
Going to ask my neighbor if i can remove some of those manago tree limbs in the back. I want the orchard to get some of that morning sun 6:30 am.
My best tip I can give after becoming proficient in grafting: Parafilm. Always and everywhere!
For T-budding wrap it tight around the ends and under the bud, then one pre stretched layer over the bud and let it break through by itself, unless you happen to be there and gently free it.
I used real parafilm this year instead of cheap stuff from Amazon. Made a HUGE difference! Thank you for that follow up
I got a whole 4" roll of chemistry Parafilm in a damaged box on ebay for cheap, that will last years!
