I use chef knife gloves when doing my grafts; they are cheap and offer a nice degree of safety (and don’t feel clumsy at all)
Amazon has them under $10
A bit off topic but it is grafting. Vegetable grafting question. Going to try squash and cucumber grafting to help pest and disease issues. I wonder if bush onto long vine would result in bush or long vine? Summer squash onto butternut. I may need to use bush butternut to get bush type. Any thoughts?
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Last year I (bud)grafted some gooseberries on a standard (ribes aureum). These are sprouting now. Should I cut off already the part of the rootstock above the sprouting bud, or do I have to wait until the shoot is longer (an inch or so)?
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Fruitwood folks sent me these bare root peaches that are already leafing out. I’m gonna buy pots tomorrow to stick em in. I figure the sap is flowing already so I will bench graft them and pot up same day. How much growth do I need to remove? I’m doing things indoors so I might as well try a chip bud on each for redundancy no?
How do these practice whip&tounge grafts look? Far right one is not good I know. Diving into grafting for the first time this year. I have probably 5 dozen or so to attempt. Real grafting knife comes this week I’ve just been messing around with a utility blade now. Sorry for all the questions, I am equally nervous and excited.
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Did a cleft graft of Craven’s Craving fig onto my Black Mission (in a pot), that I repotted (up-potted) a few days ago. Writing this down, I’m wondering if I was too hasty with this graft. The same tree was grafted with Yellow Long Neck fig on another branch. Anyways - it’s done now. I also ended up taking off the last remaining LONG branch with no growth on it except for the tip. Fingers crossed on this one.
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They look like they’d take, grafting tends to be less about precision and more about tight contact at the cambium and time of the year. I’ve had a couple grafts I was really proud of fail and some that I knew wouldn’t make it take off almost immediately.
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Luisa and Dapple Dandy on Rootpac-R.
Buds have broken through the parafilm.
Of course at the moment this just means the scions are alive. After 2 inches or more of growth I think I can know it’s at least partially connected to the rootstock.
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Having never tried bud grafting gooseberry, but growing several black currants, I can say Ribes species are so tough, I would cut above those happy bud grafts now. If you feel skittish about it, wait another week until those leaves have filled out to feed the new union.
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Technically this is a winter graft (done in late December), but this is “Nancy” avocado from @george on a Fuerte seedling, it’s promising to be budding out after a few months rather than right away (when I mostly see avocado grafts fail):
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Sugar twist, candy heat, and sweat treat pluerry all grafted to an elbow of my 12 year old cherry. Grafted the 1st week of September.
Then flavor queen, flavor king and dapple dandy. To the same tree. Grafted on November 1st
Has anyone ever accidentally grafted an apple to a pear tree? I found a missing pink lady scion I was scratching my head about. Turns out it was accidentally grafted w my pears. It’s waking up, that’s how I know. Any chance it will make it on a pear stock?
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I accidentally grafted an apple to a Luscious pear tree. The graft grew for several weeks, then fell off.
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There are apple interstems that can be used on pears, though, so it’s always possible you could stumble upon another pear-compatible apple cultivar by accident?
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Can I bench graft and plant right outside when temps are in their 30’s but past any chance of freeze? I normally bench graft and keep trees inside for a few weeks and feel like I lose a lot of them this way as they die off.
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@Noddykitty I did not know it was possible to graft Pluots onto a cherry. Super interesting. Do you know by any chance what the cherry rootstock was? Though I’m sure you are just grafting it to the actual cherry at this point.
I have a Lapins cherry I’ve been growing in a pot in SoCal for the last 3-ish years. Not much growth and no production. Though I know it has taken years and years for cherry production for other folks in SoCal. So if it doesn’t produce, it might be a good option for me to start grafting pluots to it.
Totally experimental. I did not either, until I read that @DennisD had top worked his sweet cherries over to plums. So I extrapolated a little and said why not pluots, since they graft to plums. If they failed, I could later graft them to the plums or pluerry that take. This was my thoughts after reading Dennis’s thread about pluerry making good interstems for stone fruit.
They very well may fail, but the bud swell and the fact I did them back in the fall gives me hope. I find most scions shrivel up by now if they aren’t viable after the winter. I don’t usually tape the scion up anymore due to our moist RH in the seattle area. I have focused on terminal ends historically, with no cuts, but am finding cut scions take well in our wet winters too, with no scion taping. I feel like I always damage the buds when I wrap the scions; this is not the normal way, I know.
As far as the tree, I really don’t know what rootstock it is. It was a tree I got from Costco 12 springs ago. Was a multi graft 4 variety cherry tree. None of the branches were type labeled then. So it was clearly on some sort of root stock. This tree has done really well, despite others problems with cherries in PNW. I know I’ve just gotten lucky and I’m not special. But I have managed to get a crop off these cherries pretty much every season we’ve had it. Seems to have more cherries than leaves every spring when it’s loaded. The biggest complaint is bird predation. Stellar jays and crows. Oh yeah raccoon last year too.
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To keep out the box, I grafted the last stick of Clark’s crab apple to the pear too, same branch. Once I realized I put the pink lady on there on accident. I am sure the winter banana person whom first did it, did not get it on the first try. Ha
It’s a 20 year + old bartlet pear I top worked to Asian pears and a few others. If they fail I guess winter banana is on next years apple scion list.
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Hi Rob,
Let me know how your cherry grafts work. I would expect the Pluerry grafts are very likely to work since they are part cherry in heritage, but if the pluots work that would be a first! I have not had any luck grafting plums or pluots straight to a cherry rootstock without an interstem. The two interstems that I have used with success were Adara plum and Cherry plum, both are genus Prunus cerasifera.
Dennis
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Anyone care to answer this question from above?
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Hi Tia,
If the buds are still dormant, scions should be ok to take for grafting. Those terminal buds may be too far open to be useful, but the other growth buds look dormant in the pic.
Best wishes
Dennis
Kent, wa
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