Aronia as rootstock

Just bumping this thread up to see how people’s pear/shipova/aronia grafts are going. I have a full grown aronia in my yard, and would like to graft it over to something tastier.

Did any of yours produce fruit? How did you handle the mismatch in size between the rootstock and scion? Any advice for success? If I keep an aronia nurse branch, will that help?

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Clark, how did this work out? And do you think grafting low on the aronia would allow the pear to root itself later? I hadn’t tried grafting yet, but will do it this winter.

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@franc1969

The good news is there are no problems with the pear indicating my small yellow pear was completely compatible. The bad news is it didn’t out grow the stem it just grew the same diameter and not showing any signs of blooming. Since I did several grafts this was no one off it did it several times.

So that pear is not completely compatible, then. That’s the same as standard pear, 6+ years no bloom. I am thinking that something like a perry pear might be as unsuccessful. Almost all of those are not compatible with quince as rootstock- they need an interstem. Buerre Hardy is recommended, but that isn’t widely available. I may try to find something similar.

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@franc1969

It’s actually the incompatibility of quince that makes it fruit faster. I’ve got unusual rootstocks that are highly incompatible with anything which produce very quickly. Quince is tolerant of some pears but not actually compatible. The easiest pears to graft - pear interstems . The research I’ve done on pears is extensive Interstem aka interstock Pear Grafting . Why do all that work.is the question and this thread explains some of it My latest pear experiments in early fruiting . Wild Callery might all be genetically diverse but that can be useful How tough are callery as rootstocks? Why use them? . Some things are hard to put together Pear rootstocks influence on Fruit size there is a great deal we don’t know. Pay very close attention to that last link as I fruited many pears in just a year or two. Some rootstock such as ohxf333 do indeed force a pear to produce fruit faster but the fruit can be smaller and off flavored the first couple of years. The experimental rootsocks I grow are definately fruiting quickly.

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@ampersand
How is that pear on Aronia doing from 2016 ?

It barely grew roots and never set fruit, so I replaced it. I suspect there was partial graft incompatibility, the Shipova was much larger than the aronia at the end. Perhaps there wasn’t enough energy flow to the rootsz who knows.

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@ampersand

My aronia with my small yellow pear grafted to it is still alive but there have been no fruit yet.

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i put in a 5ft. ivans beauty mtn. ash/ aronia hybrid tree last spring from onegreenworld.com. it put on about 16in. of new growth last summer. going to try a few pear grafts on it as well including shipova. pears took on my pure mtn ash so far so will be interesting to see how they do on this hybrid. my shipova on aronia is also very slow growing. at 3rd leaf is only 3ft tall and has put out only about 12in.of new growth. hopefully will do better on the much bigger tree. plan to take the grafting trimmings from my ivans beauty and put them on strait mtn ash seedlings to make some more of these trees. anyone growing the ivans belle which is a Russian hybrid of mtn. ash and hawthorn? i would be interested in a few scions of these also.

Someday I might have something valuable to contribute to this thread… yesterday I grafted over a large (about 10 feet tall) aronia bush in my back yard. I did Harrow sweet, Harrow delight, and harvest queen pears. I also did a bunch of sorbopyrus that I got from GRIN: Shipova, Smokvarka, Bulbiformis, Washington Park Arboretum 569-60, and a pollwiller seedling called CIGC 42.

Here are some pictures!

I chopped the aronia bush down at around hip height in order to leave some nurse branches on the aronia rootstock. Hopefully the nurse branches will help so that there isn’t such a mis-match in rootstock and scion size?

Haha, maybe in 3-5 years I’ll have something to report :stuck_out_tongue:

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The Aronia to which I’ve grafted pear and Shipova have ungrafted shoots as well.

Shipova fruited last fall and looks to have more blooms coming this year.

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Its good to know that someone’s actually fruited! How did the Shipova taste? How long did it take to fruit?

I posted somewhere here about them, probably with picture.

Maybe 3 years, blooming after 2. I only got 3 fruit. The first was bland and uninteresting, made me question if there was any value in the fruit. It was picked under-ripe. The 2nd was delicious, and I know it is a worthy undertaking now. The 3rd was ho-hum, I can’t remember if it was under, or over ripe.

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Those of you with pear on Aronia grafts might try taking the experiment to a new level now that they’re well established. If slashes are cut through the graft unions at angles to induce budding and growth from the area of mingled tissue there is a chance that some chimeras could result! If such chimeras do result they could end up being very interesting.

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I haven’t been paying attention to the chimera discussion. How would you describe to my 11 year old what one would hope to see from such an experiment?

The outcomes of a chimera would be variable. Based off what I know of already existing chimeras of various species some possibilities could be as follows:
*Intermediate traits between both species all throughout the chimera
*Parts of a plant resembling one species and parts resembling the other
*Both of the above combined

Any of these possibilities would be fascinating, but in some cases might prove to even be useful. Like a bush growth habit with pear like fruit or maybe milder pear like skin over aronia berry flesh, or purple aronia skin over pear flesh.

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My wife and I have been fascinated by the notion of chimera since we watched one of those “true story” shows she likes in which a woman was prosecuted for some type of welfare fraud or something for claiming her daughter for benefits, and upon genetic testing, her daughter was shown not to be hers.

Apparently the woman was a chimera and her uterus/ovaries whatever didn’t have the same DNA as the sample they took from her. It took multiple attempts before they were able to confirm that she was in fact the biological mother.

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Interesting! how could a person to be chimera?

Maybe this should be in the Chimera thread, but apparently its even more complicated. Her 2 children were initially deemed to not have the same mother as one another:

I’m re-reading in stages. Also juicy is that they intercepted the 3rd child at the hospital, which also tested negative for being hers!

Also of note:

Kaye states that Krimsky and Simoncelli’s point that any human could display some trait of chimerism is only true because there are numerous ways someone could be considered a chimera. One is maternal-fetal microchimerism, a phenomenon that occurs during typical human gestation involving a transfer of cells between the fetus and pregnant woman. Since every human undergoes gestation, every developing fetus would have some cells from its gestational carrier in addition to its own cells, technically making it a chimera. However, Kaye states that those forms of chimerism would not affect how DNA is left in crime scenes. Kaye also asserts that chimerism in the cases of Fairchild and Keegan are the exception and should not change how the public views DNA evidence. That is due to the fact that Fairchild and Keegan exhibit two DNA lines only in very specific areas of their bodies, and only at a microscopic level.

The Fairchild case of chimerism prompted many questions about the reliance on DNA evidence in the US justice system and how common chimerism might be in the general population. The documentary “The Twin Inside Me,” which first aired in 2006, documents a firsthand account from Fairchild and her family. It examines the extent of the legal and biological questions raised by an example of legal guardianship being threatened by genetic evidence in the case of a chimeric woman.

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I’m imagining a pear with a purple beauty mark on it. :joy:

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