It’s seems like it is for moisture retention. Here’s an example from Ukraine. You can skip to the 4:30 mark to see it. He uses moist wood shavings. I’ve seen others use sand.
I also will be attempting to graft walnuts this spring/summer. I’m thinking of trying it.
This is a standard chip bud. To keep the bud wet, he fills a plastic bag with wet sawdust. The bottom of the bag is tied up a bit loosely, so rain water can drip down. If there’s no rain, he waters the sawdust to keep it wet.
On 2/16: I Grafted 12 Spring Satin scions on potted trees in greenhouse and on 2/23 I grafted SM Plumcots on potted trees in the greenhouse. Temperatures ranged from 33f to 85f over the following weeks.
Spring satin
Hi Brady
I got scions from Robert @ SoMtHomestead, who said his tree was mislabeled from Lowe’s, so he just gave it that name!
Maybe once it fruits I can say more about it! I don’t have a Plumcot so it will be an interesting one to try here
Take care
Dennis
Today I redid 2 Jujube grafts, one for Ga-866 and one for Black Sea. I think after seeing Massandra jujube leafing out, I suspect the rest of scions I grafted in early Feb didn’t take, but they are not dead either. When the weather get better I will redo some more. It took me a while to decide. When do people think the grafts didn’t take and time to redo them.
We just came thru a cold spell but next 10 days much warmer. I figure the cold spell may have slowed down the grafts i have done so far (pear, goumi, plum). Got a few pics this morning of progress.
Here is one of my Montmorency cherry grafts. It’s been about a month and I have been wondering when the parafilm should come off. Today I unwrapped the parafilm to see how the callous was doing, for some reason it was green, is this normal? Also before rewrapping I noticed that this green had turned into brown probably due to oxidation, does this impact the grafts success? .
Kind of the opposite of top work. Is bottom work a thing? Basically,I had gave away scions to 3 different people of my Salish summer peach. I foolishly cut most of those from the bottom limbs. That, and a little dead limbs from winter snow/frost, and all of a sudden the tree is all trunk and no branches.
Wanted to add some lower scaffolding without topping. We shall see. Wish me luck.