it’s easy to adjust the stick and the pliability by adjusting the proportion of bees wax to oil. It may take a bit of time since it’s easier to mix them with the wax melted. I use mineral oil since vegetable oil can go off eventually and make it less kind to the nose. If I have cedar oil I also add some of that.
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Whatever is most comfortable, as long as you can keep a supply.
I really don’t like the black petroleum tars. I use a blend of beeswax and pine rosin I found a recipe for online described as a ‘grafting wax’. Love the stuff, and have never had anything but good results with it, and made up a lifetime supply for about $12
(…btw, it also makes the best leather glove and boot water proofing material you can find)
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Do you want to share the recipe? And where do you get pine resin (short of gathering it yourself)?
I bought a small bag of powdered pine rosin off Ebay, and the wax from a local beekeeper. I don’t recall the ratio, but had to fiddle with it a bit to reach a state that would ‘hand soften’- sometimes it’s referred to as ‘handwax’ for that reason. There were lots of recipes on Google last I checked.
It’s a good thing to do this time of year while waiting for the snow to melt. You can blend it from soft for March, to hard for summer…
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Shellac
I did the same, there are a few variations to the recipe and I tried several to select the one that seemed to have the best consistency. The one I went with was:
4 parts pine rosin (200g), a powder form of pine sap… which when you google it is the basis for all good things sticky and sounds like a typo of epoxy resin (available in 1 lb bags on amazon)
2 parts beeswax (100g) - this was easy we let our neighbour keep some beehives here and he pays his rent in honey and beeswax when ever I ask for some
1 part lard (50g) - so the recipes all specify tallow… which is rendered beef fat in a block that’s shelf stable just like lard, which is from pork. Grocery stores here only sell lard, and I could have made tallow by frying some fatty steak and pouring off the grease… but I imagine lard is an ok substitute.
These are all thrown into some mason jars and I found the best way was to set my over for about 300F for half an hour. The rosin has a high melting point, and I had do this twice to actually get it all to melt and disolve, my first run had little hard unmelted pieces. Note the rosin I sourced was around 20 CAD for 450g… or 15 USD for 1 lb. Beeswax can be found on etsy by the lb, and lard is few dollars in the baking isle.
When it’s melted and still up to temperature you pour it into a pail of cold water, and it makes this cool exploded waxy mass, you can pull it out in one lump and then squish / pull / kneed to improve the texture and incorporate some air. The finished material is a pale manilla color. Rubbing some of the lard on your hands keeps it from sticking. I rolled it into manageable chunks and wrapped them in waxed paper. If you come back the next day it’s stiffer but still pliable.
The other variations I tried substituted the rendered fat for raw linseed oil, but I think that’s always the second best option - it turns the wax more yellow and it doesn’t have the same stretchy consistency. Other recipes use a higher beeswax ratio, like the same ingredients in a 1 : 1 : 1 mix, and that also didn’t seem as good. I wanted to use the highest beeswax ratio available since I have more of it. There variations that are like 4 : 1, rosin : beeswax but I think at that point you’re making a hard wax that must be heated or melted to use.
What I was after here is a wax that be used cold, but you can also use this same stuff melted and dip cut ends or brush it on. I use parafilm and budding tape for most of my field grafting, and usually some asphalt tree coat for sealing larger cuts when top working. If I don’t have that on hand it’s like too much tape and parafilm to cover the stump, and the rain can get in. This stuff will come in handy as a replacement and I can imagine it’s far nicer to work with. Also cool that it was just a given that anyone grafting would make some grafting wax with a similar recipe 100 years ago.
One more thing I did while the wax was liquid was drop some balls of cotton yarn in for a few minutes. This is to make waxed string which was a standard for root grafting.
On a side note, the more popular reason you can find rosin on amazon and I admit this was advertised right on the bag - is that a beeswax rosin mix is the stuff you can melt into fabric to make these trendy beeswax wraps. So I cut up an old cotton shirt into some squares and dipped them in while I was doing the string, and once saturated spread them out on a pan to dry. They turned out perfect, I guess you can use them as a reusable substitute for saran wrap and they’re washable etc. Same recipe, two useful applications.
Reference: Propagation by Means of Budding and Grafting Part 5 - Small Farmer's JournalSmall Farmer's Journal
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I wonder if rodents every climb up to harvest calories from the lard.
It really isn’t very expensive to purchase Gashell, much less than the time expense of making my own. But I live near NYC where wages are high and time is precious.
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I blended mine on the ‘firm’ side and wrap in aluminum foil, so days near freezing require a little time warming up on the tractor’s engine or truck’s heater duct before putting in pocket to stay warm. Sunny days in May its the perfect consistency for ‘touch ups’ and sealing the smallest sort of gaps and largest stump cuts, while still remaining solid enough to spend summer in my supply box down cellar. I wax all the boots and gloves in August where just sunlight and daily temperatures bring it to a heavy axle grease consistency. Very useful stuff, smells good, and good for chapped hands too, but don’t forget and leave a chunk on your dashboard! 
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Never any rodent or insect damage seen here- I think the pine rosin is a deterrent.
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Maybe I could use it for styling gel.
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You do you. 
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I use the toilet bowl wax (The stuff used to seat the John on the floor.). I use it to dab off the top of the scion used in the graft.
It’s easy enough to smear some on the buddy tape that I use to bind the graft while I am at it.
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I did that as well but I’ve read that there can be problems with it, and I’ve seen a couple of grafts I’ve made where the bark was weird where it had crept in. Not sure if the Johnny wax was a problem or not.
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I was really interested to read of the beeswax formula using pine rosin. I can see where that would add some stickiness, but in my experience just adding oil to beeswax can make a material that’s as sticky as I like. This can be adjusted by changing the proportions in the two ingredients. Think of all the body care products that basically follow this mix. In fact ,I use a small pocket tin that once held lip balm to carry a small supply of the ‘grafting wax’ in my pocket. Also, if my hands are dry I can simply rub any extra on my skin.
I would give proportions, but I have never paid attention. The beeswax is the essential ingredient, and I vary the oil to make a putty that is useful with minimal warming. The more oil the stickier it gets. To fine tune the stick I might use a small amount of Surround, the very fine white clay we spray on trees, kneaded into the wax mix as necessary. To me the objective is not the most longevity in the environment, just something that excludes water until the graft is healed.
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I use this quite often and it works very well allows the grafts to heal the cut over time. The nice thing is that it seals the broken bark around the perimeter and prevents water from leaking into graft unions. I get mine from Walmart
Dennis
Kent, wa
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I love Doc Farwells.
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I bought some Lac Balsam for the grafting I will be doing. In researching for my first grafts I found that it has at least a little empirical evidence for helping with wound healing.
I have used a 20 year old roll of parafilm, and it worked fine. My parafilm lives in a dark closet in an air conditioned house, but i didn’t do anything special to preserve it.
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I’ve been thinking about adding pine resin to the beeswax, Ive used to add paraffin to firm it up. Parafilm to get everything tight and beeswax to seal the scion. 30 years of using parafilm in lab, old parafilm usually works but rips easier, and is harder to peel off the roll. If I have many grafts to do, its a pain when the parafilm tears as I try to pull it tight over the graft… or try to peel it off the roll with the thumb I just cut with the utility knife.
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