This has become my preferred choice for field grafts. It’s really easy to execute and the success rate is very high.
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hm, i wonder why my bark graft didnt work…. maybe it wasnt long enough.
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Fwiw, bark grafts are inherently less tightly bound to the root stock than whip and tongue or cleft grafts. So I think you have to work harder to ensure a tight connection. I wrap mine with stretchy electrical tape (linerless splicing tape) and then add one or two layers of zip ties around the circumference. I get the zip ties as tight as I can.
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zip ties are a good idea, i will implement that next time. I used the electrical tape but i just removed them and dead and 0 callus formation
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I totally agree on tight electric tape! (And when you want to remove it you can on the opposite side from the graft make a slice through it or just mostly through it and let nature finish pulling it off over time).
In my opinion, I think that’s overkill with the zip ties, which you’ll have to remove to not strangle it, sometimes electrical tape can stay more than a year without causing trouble, but I always tape on a bird perch branch over my graft, so that might be my version of overkill.
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Use Parafilm! If you do everything wrong, but use Parafilm you should get 30% still, really it’s that good, it doubled my success.
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i did use parafilm and electrical tape. 0 successes! well i had one on mulberry but then it broke off. i did 12 grafts. 
Actually i had success t-bud grafting. but none of the bark grafts or cleft grafts worked
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Then you might be having a 
problem. Tape a forked branch on to your trunk after you finish the graft so that the branches extend out around your grafts in all directions.
Birds can perch on your grafts and break them off, also I didn’t look to see what zone you’re in, I’ve done most of my grafting in humid cloudy central New York state, and if you’re in a hot dry area, wrapping with newspaper then aluminum foil is probably essential; mylar bags can also be really good, like inside out chip bags.
hm having a hard time picturing this, can dyou maybe do al ittle sketch LOL.
I am on long island. maybe it got too hot i did consider that.
@snarfing I hope this helps answer your wuestions.
Here’s a bag support branch that is still taped on after unbagging the scions, but a bird perch like that would be okay, but I’d have more forks if it were a bird perch.
This is how I wrap my trees up, usually they get a bird perch or a bag that’s got support branches to hold it of the grafts so that the wind won’t run everything when it goes the bag.
Below is one of my first fruit grafts and 3 out of 4 worked, so a beginner can do this! It was Korean Giant Asian pear on Siebold’s crabapple- Malus Sieboldii.
This is just to show the prime mailer bag in the background, for me they work perfectly! It’s really hot I might shade it with some newspaper on the outside though.
Here that whole dead branch above the tree is my bird perch, birds like the high branches to see over everything, so they usually leave anything under it alone.
Here you can see how it’s bursting or if the mylar bag, it was a summer graft on the sunny side of the tree.
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I broke off a graft a while ago. Figuring I had nothing to lose, I quickly regrafted. It took. Maybe you can have similar luck!
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I use a tightly bound wide ~1/4” rubber band over a tightly bound grafting tape, and over the next week or so they loosen up on their own.
What would constitute overkill? The use of zip ties improves the success rate, and there’s no downside if you remove the zip ties within a few months once the callus is well developed. You can do that with a snip of the pruning shears. That leaves the electrical tape for continued support.
From this year I can show you a pear tree with 16 grafts and 100% success, multiple apple trees with 4-12 grafts each and near 100% success; two pawpaw trees with roughly 16 grafts and near 100% success (one graft still ambiguous, but it’s early). So where’s the issue? Especially if a grower is having failures using only tape.
Here’s an example of the apples. The pic is 3 weeks old.
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Brace with your thumb and hope for no blood.
Here’s a x sorbopyrus interstem between two different Aronia.
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you put the zip tie on so tight you sqeezed that trunk down half an inch!
Great example, and I see it looks like all of those will survive. I had maybe 1 fail ournod my nonnisky grafts on apples out of a batch of 20 but it looks like your zip tie would be faster, so maybe I’ll try it. And maybe it will be strong enough to skip the bird perch.
Only a week? I don’t even think about taking tape off my grafts for 2 months unless I see there’s trouble, I do often open up the end of the branches which I taped over because of moisture building up under the tape or Parafilm, I probably should paint them, but any paint or paste can wreck the grafts easily.
I am going to try zip ties on walnut next year. Walnut is slow to callous and I think a tighter contact may help.
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I tried to graft two lemon scions onto an existing trifoliata rootstock. It was my first grafting attempt. I cannot find parafilm here so I used electrical tape. I placed some alu foil over it to protect it from the sun. After 6 to 7 weeks still no growth, so I removed the tape. No callous at all.
These are the grafts with the tape removed.
What did I do wrong?
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@Peyote In the heat, it’s harder also your lemons are evergreen, so that poses it’s own challenges.
Good call with the aluminum foil, but I like Amazon mailer envelopes or something similar then aluminum foil in extreme heat try to put brace sticks that will hold the bag of of your scions even when the wind blows hard.
About the grafting technique itself, your pictures are not very clear, especially the first, and it’s hard to be sure but I’ll say what I see and if it’s my imagination or a poor quality image, just tell me I’m wrong I’m not trying to offend you:
Perhaps it came out in the untaping process, but your scion definitely was not inserted far enough in the picture. The cambium need to line up so the Scion with thinner bark needs to go under the thick bark more so that the scions line up.
It looks to me like the Scion was upside-down, but that’s probably not true since it must have had leaves on it when you grafted it and been obvious, right? There are no lemons that are not evergreen, also right?
Also I feel like the first was a mismatch of grafting techniques, that’s a technique used when you have a live branch above, which maybe you should for citrus, I’m not sure especially on trifoliate orange, which is not evergreen, I would say you should have cut the branch lower and done a bark graft or side veneer, or choose a living whole branch to do that technique that you choose.
What did you do about the leaves and buds? I’m the second photo things are even less clear, but everything looks good, except it looks like you wrapped the buds with electrical tape, and they won’t break through that, but maybe you wrapped around the leaves while they were still alive? With evergreen trees I’d leave two or three small leaves on them, or cut most of each the leaf off and have a few partial leaves at most.
With evergreen tropicals you need to make them a humid greenhouse environment for optimal survival during graft healing.
And it looks like the sides of the wedge had the bark scraped off of them, they need the bark there to protect the cambium.
And for when it is successful, you don’t need to unwrap your grafts until the next year usually, 3 months later can be okay, but next year is usually better, but if you need to earlier a slice in the tape on the side away from the graft is usually better than unwrapping.
I’m sure I made some wild assumptions here, but I hope that this is helpful even if those were not your mistakes in this case.
Good luck and there’s plenty of time to try again since you don’t have the luxury of dormant scions anyway!
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Looks like my graft of Oscar’s mulberry I did a couple weeks ago, using a scion from last year might make it. Buds are starting to swell and breaking through the Parafilm. Fingers crossed.
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