with the warmer climate, maybe.
Has anyone ever tried making a rootstock (by rooting a known easy-rooting mulberry) and grafting to it in the same year?
There was an email from CRFG suggesting this practice. Basically, you find a dormant weedy mulberry with good first-year wood in the same caliper as your scion, and stick that weedy mulberry cutting for rooting. Then after a couple months with some moderate bottom heat, you would have roots on your cutting, now turned rootstock. At that point, you’d go ahead and graft with some sort of apical technique. I can imagine you would have fewer issues with excess sap flow, and it would be a good source for rootstock if you don’t have other access. I’ll be impressed if it works.
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Ive grafted directly to easily rooted cuttings amd had the cuttings root and scions push. Not ideal, but it can work in a pinch!
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When I buy mulberry rootstock and cut the top off for grafting, I stick the cut top end into soil. They invariably root even if this is done in winter.
This is a whole new set of rootstock for next year. Basically you’re buying just once.
Or if you are frugal, you can cut each of the tops again and make multiple rootstocks.
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Did those grafts survive through the summer?
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im giving my Riverview a real hard pruning in late Apr. and plan to stick most of the cuttings in my nursery bed. hopefully i get some to root and finally get the tree to fruit.
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This is what worked the best for me, actually. I root out the mislabeled “morus nigra” from Dave Wilson, which is actually an Alba, into a small cup/pot and will graft onto it once it roots out for a few months with a cleft graft. Ideally when the cuttings roots enough where there is no room to wiggle. All my grafts onto bigger trees failed last year with a lot of flooding, but I will try some more chip buds this year that have top growth left on.
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So for anyone with mature mulberry trees, you can skip rooting cuttings to use as rootstock. You can simply dig up pieces of root to graft directly to. I did this last year using two different grafting methods. I did some with “bark grafting” and some with “wedge grafting”. Initially all grafts were successful and put on growth, but because of the aggressive cambium growth on the roots, the bark grafts became forcibly pushed off of the roots as the cambium from the roots grew under them and swelled up. The wedge grafts were not able to push off the scions so there were no complications after the grafts took. Therefore moving forward I’ll just do the wedge graft style for these.
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is this more or less an inverted cleft, with the wedge cut onto the root rather than the scion? This has been talked about elsewhere but one issue Ive run into at times with root grafts is where to match cambium. Roots tend to have thicker bark for a given caliper, so my instinct has always been to overshoot a bit on the root caliper so that the cambium aligns. Ive had reasonably good take on mulberry root grafts. Some varieties, like the contorted ‘unryu’ have long straight rope like roots that are easy to dig and deal with.
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I think wedge grafting is just another way to say cleft grafting. I cut the scion to a wedge and then insert it into the split in the root. I too was concerned about lining up cambium, but honestly the cambium around the roots proved to be so aggressive in growth that I think the root and scion cambium would find each other pretty quickly even if not perfectly lined up. I had extra root pieces last year that I didn’t graft so I just stuck them in a pot with the ends above the soil to see what would happen and they all had extensive cambium proliferation “bubbling” out of the cut ends over the growing season. They actually all still seem alive even now to be honest.
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Yes, I did this last year, though it wasn’t premeditated. I had received cuttings of alleged Shelli and rooted them over the winter, but Marta realized her source had mislabeled them and they weren’t Shelli after all. So in early summer, I T-budded two of them with buds of M. nigra varieties. They grew fine, though less growth before dormancy than if they’d been grafted earlier in the season.
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This is how grapes are grafted commercially. Saves time and space since the grafts are callused at the same time the rootstocks cuttings are rooting. The whole thing can be automated. No reason why it wouldn’t work for mulberries as well.
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it does work well in my experience. some of the easy rooting albas can push substantial roots in a couple of weeks. even if overall take winds up being lower than other grafts, its so space efficient that its a good trick to have up your sleeve
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Thanks for clarifying! Do you try to avoid having the graft union buried underground? Or does that not matter?
I initially left the graft union exposed and then buried it after it had healed. I’m not sure whether it’s better to do it that way or just bury it from the get go, but my thought process was that leaving it exposed would allow me to remove the grafting tape once it was healed, but after that it would be good to bury the graft to encourage roots to form from the scion since the rootstock isn’t actually needed for any special function like dwarfing or soil tolerances.
I was so happy with last year’s results that I hope to do a larger batch this year. I was specifically using true Morus nigra for the scion so using this method to produce more M. nigra that can eventually become “own-root” after the graft union is buried is very appealing to me. Almost every tree I plant around here gets damaged by animals of one kind or another at some point so own root trees that can resprout true to type are very important to me.
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i usually wrap the union with parafilm. I imagine that using thread or something that degrades in a few weeks combined with a buried union might work well, though Ive yet to try it.
I have a mulberry tree from seed. A gift from the bird. That 1 foot tree at the beginning of last year grown into 8 feet tall near the end of the year. The trunk split into 2 major stems. I grafted the major stems using W&T and the side branches using cleft during Fall.
One of the W&T took this year. It was handled differently from the rest. Only the top and the union was wrapped in plastic. Then I use a paper brown bag to cover it and later removed during the wet season. It was first one to come out. To be fair, the tree just beginning to wake up. So, more graft may be coming out soon.
