ttried to put it on this year’s growth, a green shoot from the tree about the size of the bean vine. I know there’s a name for this graft, a reverse cleft? it was the best I could do. I have a ton of red runners so I experimented with these a few ways before settling on this.
greasy bean: now I love these and was only willing to sacrifice one plant to this. if this takes whole tree will be greasy bean next year lol. I went overboard on attaching it and picked the least bird-exposed spot for this one.
long shot of tthe beans. I’ll go another round if anyone knows a better way to try, I’ll try it. I’m not a skilled grafter in general so, anything complex I will try but expect failure please. I have many red runners and lazy pole beans I can play with, the lazy beans will be leafing and thick stemmed end of the week.
I also have a black locust I can try on, it’s harder to get to though and I won’t be able to monitor like I can these (I can see these from my hammock)
The article was behind a paywall so I googled it. It turns out that only three of the five people who ate the tomatoes got sick and the person who did the grafting had learned to do so from someone else who had been doing it for years without harm. It turns out the person who had been doing it longer always removed the leaves (I would assume that meant they didn’t let anything grow below the graft) whereas the person who grew the grafted tomatoes which made 3 of the 5 sick had not removed the leaves of the jimson weed below the graft.
greasy bean, surprisingly, is still growing onward, and has two new leaves as I would expect from it being in the ground though the old leaves are wilted.
tomorrow I’ll try the black locust. it’s in full flower but the bark is still “slipping”- the closest it gets on that tree. will post photos as I go. again any suggestions about a better way to do this- scion/stock selection, graft methods etc would be appreciated. I’m a beginner.
I can try bark grafts maybe on the black locust? I don’t like that tree much and don’t mind tormenting it. the flowers taste nice though.
Maybe try to clip most of the leaves off and protect it from drying out until or if it takes. Some people use foil to protect it against the sun. Maybe spray it every once in a while? Somebody here more experienced than I might have some better pointers. There is an art to grafting non-dormant scions.
My apple on photinia is doing well. It should be dead. It’s in an area that is next to a forest and the tree canopy is so thick that area gets almost no light. You can also see the insect pressure. There is every kind of insect in there chewing on the leaves yet it is still alive. The pear on photinia is also doing well. Since this photinia is evergreen I’m wondering what will happen in the fall?
You’ve inspired me to try grafting onto my photinia bushes next year. I was really surprised to learn how closely they are related to apples. At first glance they don’t really look like apples at all, but upon closer inspection the individual flowers do have similar structure (of course physical similarity is sometimes a very poor predictor of genetic similarity!)
I have some really old photinia hedges that I don’t love, but also don’t have the heart to remove entirely because they are very established and grow without any irrigation. Which is a miracle in my climate, we often don’t get a drop of rain for 6-8 months in a row.
Yeah, I’ve been trying to graft avocado scions onto my Umbellularia californica tree for a couple years now because the flowers, fruit, leaves all look so damn similar that I couldn’t believe there had only been a single reported attempt to graft them almost a century ago, using just a single avocado cultivar and U. californica seedlings (never a mature bay tree). But so far at least, no luck. I’m planning to try some budding of a few cultivars this summer.
Upon some further reading the fact that your grafts look healthy may be a good indicator that your specific Photinia doesn’t have crazy high cyanogenic glycoside levels?
This study has shown that the graft incompatibility between pear and quince trees occurs in large part, due to the difference in the levels of [cyanogenic glycosides (CGs)] of both species. In addition, it can be suggested that when the difference between the contents of the scion and the rootstock is small (≤ 5 mg g-1), there is no effect on grafting compatibility; when the differences increase (> 5 and < 20mg g-1), an acceptable level of compatibility for the growth and development of the graft may occur but may result in the reduction of vigor at different levels. Finally, when the difference is high (≥ 20 mg g-1), in addition to the drastic reduction in vigor, there are problems of continuity in graft union, low yield, and early defoliation. (source)
I haven’t been able to find anything about cyanogenic glycoside mobility within plant tissues however. I’m not sure how much of a risk it really is, given that plenty of edible species and cultivars in the apple/pear family produce these compounds in certain parts of the plant (notably apple seeds!). But even still I might not be willing to be the guinea pig
They do use photinia as a rootstock for loquat in China. I have a loquat graft too and it reached a certain point and seems to have stalled after it was attacked by insects. It’s not dead but not thriving either. Maybe it needs more light? The apple is kind of a surprise.
This is my pomegranate on crape Myrtle. I have several more I did recently. One trick I tried is to graft on new growth. The thing I wanted to test is a lot of people will cut the crape Myrtle off to a stub and then all this new growth is there within a short time. I did that on a thicker branch and when the new growth was big enough I grafted dormant scions to it. They all seem to be taking which is amazing for this time of year. I also tried a side graft with a skinny pom scion. That seems to be taking too, Some of my older grafts I did a long time ago just sat there and did nothing for a couple of months. Then all of a sudden they came alive. Others took right away. Others died. Next year I will convert all of them to frankenmyrtles. One thing I noticed about pomegranates is they don’t like soggy conditions. Crape Myrtle is much more tolerant of that. So I think this is a good combination where I live.
I do about a handful of these every year with different avocado cultivars, in the hope that the reported incompatibility was due to the cultivar that was used. So far they all failed both of the last two years, but I’m trying other methods like chip buds to see if it can overcome the compatibility issues.
I don’t have high hopes, though, since not even all Persea species are compatible with avocado, let alone this other genus. My main reason for wanting to try so much is how much more these fruit look like an avocado than even most of the rest of Persea species.
I’ve thought the same about the similarities between myrtle fruit and avocados. If we could find a variety or species that is compatible with both, we’d have a possible interstem. Myrtles are so tenacious and hardy, as rootstocks they could revolutionize avocado growing.
Unfortunately, the studies that have been done on Persea graft compatibility show that avocados aren’t even compatible with half the species in their genus, so it seems unlikely they’d have and intergeneric graft compatibility with Umbellularia californica. @JoeReal posted this chart from the main study done on Persea long ago:
