Grafting Fruit Trees: Tomato-Style

I am wondering if someone tried this tomato-style of grafting for fruit tree seedlings (in my specific case: mulberries), I am sure I can tie together scion and rootstock young green tree seedlings and they will be grafted naturally in few months, then I can cut top of rootstock and leave two “roots”, letting scion to have double-roots (and possibly to get root-grafted plant, meaning roots -grafted-to-roots):

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Absolutely genius mate ! I want to try with papaya and chilli if possible ? Will post photo of said attempt in a few weeks.

i think the biggest issue with that is people are generally using grafting of fruit trees to propagate known trees asexually…

so you could certainly grow a seedling or purchased rootstock for grafting say an apple, but you aren’t likely to also have a tiny Ashmead’s growing right next to it that you can graft–with tomatoes, etc. you have 2 plants coming up true, from seed.

Yes I understand “Fruit Growers” have never thought about such alternative grafting, because most fruit grafting (99.99%) is with hardwood “cultivars”, such as peach varieties discovered as sports of other peach cultivars.

But research labs trying to select unique cultivar from seedling may use that to boost speed of growth, and maybe something else?

I want to graft seedlings: to graft Morus Nigra to Morus Alba Tatarica. All the methods about tree grafting found in libraries and Internet are “hardwood grafting”.

I was thinking initially: what I plant Nigra, and later on add some seeds of Tatarica around, in a tight cup, over time Nigra will create “natural graft” with Albas, and because of tight space (I’ll leave it in this small cup for a year at least) it will be even naturally grafted to Nigra.

But this pic is amazing, yes :slight_smile: I found it by searching “grafting clips” at AliExpress store.

I’d also add: nurseries can use it even with Ashmead apple cultivar which cannot be propagated by seedlings!

“Micro-Propagation”, “Tissue Culture”. Can be grafted to M26 rootstock while M26 is also in the “micro-propagation” stage (for example). Just an idea :wink:

And it is possible with hardwood too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inosculation

Bam, you’re missing my point, I am saying I DOUBT it would be practical.

  1. It is extremely simple to just graft a stick of ashmeads or other apple to a rootstock. That “stick” of scion is extremely portable and can come with you, and you could theoretically take thousands of scions from a single apple tree. And take them literally anywhere your rootstock may be. Although most nurseries bud, I believe, same deal…you can walk down an entire row of rootstocks and add buds or scions as you go.

  2. On the flip side, the only way this grafting tomato-style would work is if you either had incredibly tiny ashmead trees growing alongside your rootstock, or if you trained apple branches to grow incredibly low, so that you could then train them back upright near a bunch of rootstocks grown around the periphery of your ashmeads tree. And if you actually did the “tiny ashmeads” model, like the tomato grafting outline shows, all you would be doing in the first places is swapping the top of the ashmead’s from an already growing plant to another…that first ashmeads would be on rootstock (unless you had ashmeads cuttings which were growing, also a fair bit of work to establish) so you’d just be swapping it from one existing rootstock to another.

I don’t doubt it could work, in theory, it’s just probably more work than typical grafting. By way of example, I live in Wisconsin. I can drive to Colorado by going through iowa and Nebraska, on a straight and direct route.

I can ALSO get there by driving to Illinois, down into Tennessee, over to Alabama and Mississippi and Louisiana, then back up through Missouri and Kansas…it would still get me to Colorado, but in a much more difficult and time-consuming manner.

I think to bring this tomato-grafting approach to apples and other trees that are relatively simple to graft anyway is similar, it would work but I don’t think it is going to really save any effort or simplify the process logistically in any manner…

bam, I missed your earlier post, which clarified your intent. In a case like that it might offer some practical feasibility, it would be an extremely limited niche but for something like your mulberry project it might offer the advantage of having more time for the graft to take and develop, vs something like root-grafting, which they do for tree peonies

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Thank you @markalbob! Yes, my idea is crazy, but who knows maybe huge nurseries-propagators will adapt it for Ashmeads: tho minutes per graft vs. 10 seconds per graft (in a sterile glove-box, in a lab, with unrooted M26 and Ashmeads) - just crazy viewpoint. Maybe it will create new opportunities to experiment. Not practical for me right now (I am just urban hobbyist)

I hope it will work with mulberries