I have a Red Heart plum that I planted about 15 years ago. It has never produced any real quantity of fruit since day one, but it is in a poor location far removed from any other Japanese plum trees and I have no intention of planting more fruit trees in that area.
Last spring I grafted Burbank plum onto it which took. This spring I grafted 4 other J plums in the hope of turning it a productive tree by adding more pollinizers. It’s starting to look like all four grafts are going to take. Three of the new grafts were cleft grafts.
The other graft I’m not really sure what you’d call it. The tree is an open center tree that the deer pretty much destroyed half of the scaffolds on it. I wanted to attempt to get some scaffolds back in the area the deer destroyed. This turned out to be not so easy.
I only had one area on the trunk to attempt this and the bark is quite old and tough there. I started by trying to cut an inverted V to slip a scion under the cambium layer at the top. The bark was too tough and wasn’t slipping at all. I ended up using a chisel to split the bark from the core wood. I really had no idea if I’d managed to get a good area with any cambium contact for the graft. I cut a one bud scion in the same way you’d cut a scion for inserting in a cleft graft. I wanted to graft beauty onto this tree and I only had one very short scion left.
I pried the bark open and inserted the single bud scion underneath with the bud just peeking out of the bark. I then taped the bark around the graft as tightly as I could with electrical tape. Next I sealed around the graft site where rainwater might be able to enter with a grafting sealant.
After that I put a large notch above the graft site in the hope it might help induce the bud to break. This graft was like nothing I’d ever done before, and frankly I didn’t think it had a prayer of working. I looked today and to my great surprise I noticed a small bit of growth breaking out of the bud.
