The cool weather this year is nice though our rainfall has been limited. The wind has been excessive which requires some extra thought in field grafting. Grafting in Kansas is a little different than what many people might think. Yesterday i planned to graft a ts hardy pear tree. When i looked for the scion wood it was gone from my grafting tool bucket. It was in a 5 gallon plastic bucket. Wind speeds were at least 40 mph. That is not unusual this year it has been windy most of the time and calm once in awhile. My hat was ripped off my head an unknown number of times during gusts.
Clark,
Is this BET rootstock? I got it from fruit woods and confirmed it with the owner. But however every time I look it, it doesn’t look like a pear tree to me.
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Cool. I thought it’s some kind of hawthorn initially…but I don’t see thorns on it probably because it’s still young.
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Someone will ask what happened to the baby pear last year i grafted with the dog leg in the trunk. It is a 6 1/2 -7 foot baby now. It will fruit in a year or two i can imagine. This is after it was hard pruned this winter.
It was around 8 feet tall last year. This was right after grafting it. It lost some height when i pruned and shaped it.
This was when i pulled the tape
This last photo was last year before it was pruned.
Pruned it back to a central leader and removed the other side of the cleft. Shaped it up which will allow it to grow really good this year. We just have not had any rain.
When I removed betulifolia rootstock suckers I also had a feeling the leaves had resemblance to hawthorn leaves.
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It’s been windy here in northern Kentucky as well these past few years. I don’t ever remember it being this consistently windy. I thought my hunting blind was going to launch my dad and I while turkey hunting this evening.
What do you do when you graft to big rootstock when you get fast growth, keep cutting it back or stake them somehow? I had some grafts taken out last year with a sudden 75 mph gust. The winds came and were finished in less than 5 minutes. Another grew 4 feet last year and decided to flop over this Spring.
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Cleft grafts as your aware are very strong. Cutting them back is necessary sometimes.
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Yeah, they are strong but my clefts were the ones that broke. They grew for 2 months and probably 2-3 feet of growth before the wind took them down. The bark graft is my floppy one. I cut it back once last year.
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A super vigorous non-grafted bud growing multiple feet in a month could also be in danger from high winds, as I have learned. Powerful wind can easily peel the entire branch off the trunk. I’ve only seen this happen in the most vigorous of trees. The attachment of the branch to the trunk is actually a fulcrum if you think about it, which gives wind a lot of leverage.
I concur with @clarkinks that cutting back a super vigorous shoot is a good idea if wind is a problem.
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Orient grafted to a small wild callery in the edge of my field… modified cleft.
Check out the nice callousing and growth.
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Looks perfect! That cleft is exactly what i would do! They look like any graft for a short time but are strong and heal over faster. Very nice knife work.
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Very nice, how long did you wait to take off the tape?
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@sockworth … i did my pear grafts Feb 28.
I have taken the tape off two of them (around 60 days later) … both modified cleft grafts … that have put on about a foot of growth already.
I have others that were grafted same time that are a little behind these growth wise… and i have not removed the tape from them yet.
I have removed tape from 5 cherry grafts and 3 goumi grafts that are just doing very well.
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Below are grafts I did on Callery pear behind a friend’s work place in April 2022. Quite some growth in 1 year.
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