Is there a Skillcult video where he adds small chunks of “punky” moist wood to the ziplock bags to store scions? The reason being that wood/bark tends to have antifungal properties and also acts as a reservoir of moisture for the scions?
Last year I started to add small chunks of moist decorated bark chips to my ziplocks, a tied clear grocery produce bag over that and then inside a dark colored reusable grocery bag to block the refrigerator light. It seemed to work OK through to about June.
Then again, Jose’s system is much more comprehensive. I think I will pull my lone peach scion out and individually wrap it since it has to stay dormant a lot longer than everything else. Fingers crossed!
Last year I simply stored peach wood loosely in ziplocks placed inside a plastic garbage bag containing a moist rag all within a cheap small fridge without defrost. I never had such good takes from my peach scion wood and now attribute problems before with tightly wrapping scion wood causing rot. Sometimes the wood would even smell off.
Perhaps the problem is prevented by bleach, or maybe the wood needs a bit of oxygen to breathe. Let me know how your method works.
My method reduces the effort required to store my wood- I used to double wrap it in two kinds of stretch wrap and then place small, tight bundles into a ziplock. When you store as much wood as I do that becomes a hassle, even just unpacking it.
Oh Alan! I had thought a had such a sure fire plan and now am filled with doubt. Maybe I will do the lazy thing after all and keep doing what you and I are doing. Eeeek!
I’m guessing you are storing scion for a short period. Sometimes wood is stored for 4 or 5 months. I’ve had some for 7 months and this year some will be stored for 5 to 6 months from trees the voles destroyed in the fall. From a scientific view the bleach and tight wrapping makes the most sense.
Yes, I only do spring grafting and prune stonefruit no earlier than March (when I collect my wood), but peach wood that I only stored for a bit more than a month has seemed to rot when tightly packaged.
I expect the vast majority of forum grafters only store wood for short periods.
Lots of people at least use a bleach solution- I don’t see how that would fail and can see how it might be beneficial, certainly fungus seems to grow on apple wood in refrigeration, however it doesn’t seem to have much negative affect on my grafts. Apple graft takes depend mostly on the vigor of the branch on which it is grafted and never are much a problem for me.
@Jose-Albacete I just followed your process for the first time.
I prepped 20 scion packets and it took several hours.
But, the soaking and drying time was a good opportunity to catch up on a my TV shows.
From your experiences does soaking in bleach for sometime cause damage to tissue, since bleach is after all corrosive? Do I need to rinse the bleach off or do I just dry the bleach, wouldn’t drying cause some bleach to stay on the cutting and cause damage? I will be using this method for cherry cuttings.
I’ve got a question that might fit in with this thread. Is it OK to collect scion wood a day or two after doing a dormant spray with horticultural oil, lime sulphur, and copper? If not, how long should you wait after a dormant spray to collect scion wood?
I discovered your wonderful first post in this forum. Great description of the process for taking, hydrating, disinfecting, wrapping, and storing scions.
A question was asked but not answered I believe in the strength of the bleach that you used.
I’m posting to clear up any differences in the product sold in Spain compared to other places like the US if we are tro follow the method you detailed so well.
If you could answer sometime this year it would be helpful.
I’m surprised to hear persimmon wood to go bad quickly. I’ve had kind of the opposite experience. My first persimmon sticks to come in ended up being delayed in the mail for a couple weeks in an especially warm April or May (2020, when early COVID was screwing everything up). They were moldy and a bit dried out when they got here. A soak in water followed by a bleach bath had them ready to go, and I had over 80% takes. This was also my first year grafting, so I suspect the 20% we’re more my fault than the scions.
This year, I grafted with year old Chuchupaka weeks, and had similar results. I did, however, fail completely with fresh Okja wood, which maybe looked a bit off. Maybe there’s a lot of variation between varieties?
Thanks for sharing the system. I have a hard time imagining how using the bleach as part of hydration isn’t hurting the scionwood, but I believe what you’re saying. I do use bleach on scions, but I’ve always done that after a hydrating soak and rinse them off afterwards. I’ll have to try your way out next time I’m processing a lot of scions.
