First attempts grafting, what about the rootstock leafing out, etc

General Fruit Growing
#1

Hi -

I tried some W&T grafting for apples & plums; 7 onto rootstock & ~ 10 onto existing trees. After reading about, watching how-to, fretting, practicing on alder etc., etc. I finally dove in as temperatures were getting warmer & worried about buds opening.
it was a freakish non-winter & since January continuous wild swings from very warm to cold or very cold, continuing as I write (predicted 15-20f tonight after 50 last night & 60 today, weirdest I’ve ever seen. This has killed off some things who thought one of the up swings was really spring (the gods don’t want me to ever have Primula, for example), or at least zapped off various first spring leaves.

It’s also made my storage of ordered trees, scions, & rootstocks $#@#! near impossible as temperatures kept getting so high the garage or basement stairs area (my two possible areas but scions in fridge OK) got too warm, then so cold it was 25f or lower in garage. The best I could do was ~ 48-55 at the bottom of basement stairs (heater boiler makes basement warmer).

The result was that a couple of my Krymsk-1 plum rootstocks started leafing out. Since they had 2-3 branches not too far up with the diameters similar to the scionwood I decided to graft onto one & left a second on (I think I read somewhere maybe keeping one leafing for a while helps energise it to ‘take’ or at least gives a second chance if the graft fails, is that so?). (I left 2-3 buds on each scion, again, for hope of better success & will ‘off’ all but one if things go OK)

Anyway, I’ve been storing them all, apples & plums, since grafting a week or so ago in a pail with sphagnum at ~60f - finally a temperature I can maintain - in low light (I read ideal ‘curing’ tepmeratrure is 55-65 apples, 60 plums). The leaves continue to open on the Krymsk and are now aboot as big as - wait for it - squirrels’ ears, and a pale green. It’s still too up & down outside to chance planting them out for a while so they stay on my stairs at 60f & may have to do so a few more weeks (hard to guess what the weather might do next).

I guess it’s OK to graft to rootstocks leafing out; is there any best practice for this? Should I give the leafing ones more light, or even soil?

Other questions - I also W&T grafted the ‘‘leftover’ scions & some others to existing ~ 8’ Wolf River & Newtown trees, leaving from 3-8 or so buds; all of them an inch or so from the cut ends, on. Someone, one of those friendlt grafting teacters on u-tube, theorized that made since when field grafting. Then I got all bold & grafted one of the clipped branches from teh Newtown onto the WR (buds not open yet)… I’ll see but is that one likely to take having not been collected back in winter or whenever?

My other observation is that while cutting went OK my ‘tongue’ cutting was a bit less consistent & sometimes was a wee difficult to keep the tips from spreading apart; this made it harder to keep the whole thing ‘closed’ when wrapping (with parafilm, though in once case I tried a small bit of masking tape first). That and keeping the graft from shifting when wrapping (jin a couple cases I unwrapped & started over).

Hoping for the best but with a sample size of zer thus far have to wait. If all fail I might go back to buying grafts, but if ~30% (of ~17 bench & field) make it I’ll keep going… As a cheapskate, I want all them to make it ($4 or 5 a scion or rootstock is too much to waste!). Plus I want to put a bunch of more varieties onto existing trees since I’m out of room for more trees (the 3 apples I bench grafter were all dwarf).

1 Like
#2

Can you get the rootstock in pots and bring in when hard freezes happen? A mobile “heeling in”, as it were.

I’d be worried about fungus and using up energy stores if not giving the leaves some light.

#3

Active growth on a rootstock is often just fine. In fact, that was the only time I succeeded in grafting European plum (Mt. Royal onto Mariana 2624); the leaves were half-filled out. I have had happy results from grafting apple even as late as the first week of June, but can’t recommend it, because I worried the new growth wouldn’t have time to harden off before frosts hit.
(That was last year when the first graft of Orange Colorado got kicked or somehow knocked over. I still had a part of the scion so tried again on another stock. If you type in Colorado Orange on the magnifying glass at the top of this page & click on it, you can find that thread & a photo of how it looked September 30 of last year.)
Even more important than light for your stocks is to maintain moisture at the roots until you make use of them. Your skittishness about the whole thing is understandable. See-saw temperatures are a fact of life where I live & haven’t had deadly effects on stocks as they come out of dormancy.

Some things will surprise you, some disappoint. It can be immensely rewarding. I enjoy apples & plums now completely unknown to me 15 years ago. (I am so cheap as to learn to stool root stocks.)

#4

I decided the plant into pots ‘inside helling in’ makes sense; there’s just two leafing-out and I had to wrap their roots a bit but putting them out for sunshine in daytime (maybe leave out when above 40 at night now that last week’s 20f low is over - for now). When it seems like frost threat over I’ll plant these all into a garden patch for a year or two.

Keep checking by field grafts every day for any signs of life but after less than 2 weeks sort of impossible to tell… I read that sometimes it takes a lot longer for grafts to leaf out than the rest of the tree.