In grafting is a great way to prevent inclusions. If you have a green shoot that goes across, you can bend it upwards along with a scion on the opposite side, scratch or shave both surfaces and tape them together they’ll heal together and you can cut the tip off of the shoot eventually, and then that will haven’t made a connection across the center, I could see the logic for doing only one to prevent inclusions, or two parallel ones.
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Have you got a reference to an article that describes it being done?
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It won’t make all of them inclusion free, but those two can connect together without inclusions, I’ll definitely start an experiment on it next year, I’m not sure how long it will take to confirm results though.
OK. I you’re making it up as you go just like me, we can run our experiments and report results as we receive them.
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I looked for old texts about how to graft and heal over large stumps and apparently that’s not a secret they wanted to share our they weren’t generally brave enough to risk a large tree.
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that toka i sawed out of the Italian plum, took a few branches with good growth and stripped a lot of leaves and cut back to make scion
i put one on the sand cherries. it looks like it’s taken despite being cut in the middle of summer.
you can see my cut end and the 3 branches coming out of it wild.
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Here’s an update. I cut the trunk down some more and I can pretty well guarantee the remaining scion is going to perish.
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Nadia Cherry plum graft on Mt Royal plum getting settled and growing (I don’t know the rootstock).
I went back a week ago and trimmed nearby competing branches, that gave the grafts a big boost in growth
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I usally whip and tongue my apples, but when the scion and root stock mismatch I sometimes do a cleft graft.
I used parafilm to wrap first, and if I thought I had poor cuts, I used 1/2” green tree tie to pull things together tightly. It stretches some and keeps pressue. It work really well and is easy to remove.
This is a cleft graft of Swiss LT onto B9 with a cleft graft and held with green tree tie.
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My Olympic Asian pear that turned black but didn’t seem to be fireblight. I think those who guessed rootstock failure were correct. I just pulled it and zero growth from when it was planted. Trash.
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Did my first grafts ever in mid-June.
Early July, looked like they had all taken happily.
Mid-July, half look dead and fried? Leaves just turned black and withered.
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Also: I want to try bridge-grafting my girdled pear tree again with some of the branches that have come out below the damage. Grafting it to itself.
But the top of the new branches are not lignified, just green wood.
Can you bridge graft with green wood? Or do you have to wait for it to lignify/turn into woody-wood?
When they first leaf out they’re using energy stored in the scion. If they don’t manage to callus before they need water/nutrients from the rootstock they shrivel up and brown.
Also, sometimes the rootstock will die. The scion also looks like that and the rootstock can scratch green and looks like it might be alive for a bit, but never gets leaves again and usually all the roots are dried out and sad.
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Agree with @benthegirl See how the ones on the right have green shoots? Those are sign of a real take. If you just get a few leaves at a bud, that’s often a sign the graft hasn’t taken, and you are just getting stored energy from the scion. It’s easy to get excited by leaves a few weeks after grafting, but I wait to see if I get shoots before repotting, etc. Also, if you put them in full sun too soon, I think you can overtax a bench graft before it’s ready. Old apple trees are pretty tough, but the young ones seem to do better with some pampering.
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Yeah I put everything in full sun 12-7 immediately. Didn’t think about protecting them. First year grafting. Made some unfortunate mistakes maybe.
One of these two green ones now shriveling. So maybe I fucked them all up. Or maybe the unions roasted in the sun. I guess I can take the tape apart and see if it started to callus at all or not.
Can you put the green ones somewhere with partial shade?
Some of my late June grafts that have sprung to life recently.
Flavor King on seedling Euro plum rootstock (chip buds). Just starting to break:
2 tiny greenwood scions of Magness pear, cleft grafted to Quince:
Green wood Flavor Supreme scion on Peach:
Mislabeled unknown Japanese variety (green wood scion) on peach:
Hopefully more of my recent grafts will be coming to life in the next week or two.
I’m chip budding almost every day now, as we’re getting to the peak time for that.
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It looks like when I leave my grafts protesced in bubble mailer envelope or plastic bags over newspaper for too long and the leaves are big inside the humid bag, and then I take the bag off and there’s full sun for two days and they die.
Did something like that happen? You usually need to unwrap them slowly, but if you get two or three rainy days in a row, sometimes you can just do it the sunset before the first rainy day and they’re fine, but that’s a risk too.
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