Potting up the rootstock can be done immediately after you do the graft for ease of the grafting process. That’s how I do it. I secure the graft, then put the entire unit up and transfer it to climate controlled area.
Almost all the apricots I have out in the field are still alive and have been since they made it there. Where I lost a lot of apricots is in grafts not taking and grafts taking for 3 months and then dying (poor quality in either rootstock or scion).
4 years of this process and fruit came only once on the oldest of all the tree grafts. Very tasty and it was a great success, but the vast majority of the trees are too young and the springs have been “not right” for any fruit to survive. Last May’s very late hard freeze ended all the fruit here except the apples.
Zone 5 B must be a challenge I imagine. What type of rootstock do you use for apricot? I could never get one to survive here, due more to infections of the bark which typically killed the tree thru gommosis. I tried two different trees that appeared healthy upon receiving them but they only lasted about a year before starting to die. I do have some grafts of Plumcots fro last spring that seem to be doing ok and some Apriums I will add this spring to see if they can survive much better. If you are successful with apricots you may want to add some of these as potential pollinators.
Dennis
Kent, wa
The beauty of indoor grafting in controlled humidity is that it pretty well assures not only that the root tree will grow well, but that the grafts won’t dry out before tissue connects. My first successful paw paw grafts were on a potted tree in my big cold frame where the humidity just naturally stays much higher than outdoors.
Curious about what rootstock you use as well. I just received ~20 lovell peach pits Im thinking of planting for rootstock and might add some prunus mandshurica pits as well.
Yeah I think our spring climate will be a big challenge, fluctations are wild even right now. Don’t think apricots will ever be a consistent fruit but I know its not impossible to grow so I will continue to put them in. I’ve been making a list of cultivars people seem to recommend, do you have a variety you think really stands out?
I’ve used Marianna, Myro, and Manchurian as rootstocks and they all perform pretty similarly here. If I had to pick one that I think might be doing better in the soil here in 6B central New York I’d say Manchurian.
None of our varieties have gone long enough to say who stands out, but that’s exactly the goal we’re trying to achieve. The springs are going to continue to be wild and unpredictable moving forward so our farm has a “spaghetti at the wall” strategy. I also pulled some old world apricot cultivars from the USDA to trial them in our climate to see if we could get a good tasting apricot to ripen on a semi-regular basis. I won’t really know how successful this project is until 10 years goes by and we have 10 springs to compare and contrast.