I have two, 1 year old apple trees that have been trained as central leaders with branches pulled horizontal and have ordered scions for grafting later in the year.
Basically I am wanting to do is to add 2 to 3 horizontal branches of different varieties to each tree.
I would like advice on the type of graft I should use to achieve horizontal branches, and where should the grafts be done, on the trunk or the branches, low in the trees or higher
Thanks for any advice
Mick
Breast height or higher is best. The higher the better. I find clefts and chip-buds work best. Sometimes you can get away with placing a cleft graft on a small horizontal branch near the middle of a tree. Subsequently I’ll post some photos of takes to give you an idea of what’s possible. You should execute lots of grafts, and backup grafts, to hedge your bets.
Freyburg cleft graft right on top of a Newtown Pippin whip on Geneva.16. These grafts always seem to do best for me. They benefit from the apical dominance and extra energy that comes with it. Some folks warn that grafting on G.16 is dangerous as it is prone to viral infections. I’ve not (yet?) seen that.
Multiple chip buds of Sweet Sixteen taking to Roxbury Russet/ Geneva.30. The best backup method.
Here we can see the Sun Tan apple (orange tape) cleft grafted to the top of this Ginger Gold/ B.9. Below is an old chip-bud of Rubinette (white tape) growing away nicely.
Here is a small cleft graft of the rare Welsh apple Baker’s Delicious attached to a small vegetative side branch on Goldrush/G.935. Sometimes you can successfully achieve this trick on a nub of fruiting spur wood, but that is harder to pull off.
I like the idea of grafting a variety to a whip. If it’s done at the right height you can have a few scaffolds of the lower variety and a few scaffolds from the newly grafted whip. In fact, I never tried it but why not add a third variety? The middle variety could act as an interstem. So if you had a whip of Roxbury, grafted on an 8" scion of Ashmeads, and then grafted a top scion of Goldrush you could end up with a pretty cool tree. Maybe I’ll try that this year. I have a Williams Pride whip that I planned to graft. The big thing would be making sure the shoots come off the scions at nice angles.
great thread…I’m going to be trying the same thing with a couple of my younger trees.
Thanks so much for spending the time in giving such aa detailed reply. I live in Australia and well away from acknowledged apple growing areas so this is somewhat experimental for me as I am growing Gala and Granny Smith in a warmer climate and wanting to add some other varieties of similar chill needs without increasing the number of trees in my backyard which is quite overcrowded with 5 citrus and 5 stone fruit in addition to the 4 apples in the ground.
I think that this idea is great and I suppose that you will remove some of them after they have settled in. Is there any harm in doing the chips spaced around the tree but separated more widely?
Thanks again
Mick
That’s a great idea!
Carrying things to an extreme you could start at the rootstock and have almost any number of inter stems going up???
Mick
That’s whats nice about grafting is you can make your own three in one trees or even have a franken tree with many verities. If your scaffolds are wide enough caliper you can graft out at the ends to keep your good horizontal growth going. You can move inward towards the trunk too but your new growth is going to grow straight up and you will have to tie them down. You can do whip and tongue that way. Cleft works great and it’s the easiest for beginners, especially if the under stock is larger diameter. .
I had a look at the tree trees yesterday and there appear to be scaffolds suitable to graft onto. The scion wood costs me $10 a stick of 4-5 buds so my thinking is that I will get 2 grafts / scion so will go for cleft grafts on the scaffold wood. I was thinking of grafting about 4" from the trunk but you seem to be advocating further out
Thanks for your thoughts Johnny
Mick
I like to put them fairly close to the trunk- I generally go several inches to a foot, and that’s partly to give me a fallback position if the first graft splits badly or otherwise goes awry. Once I stuck a graft way out on the end of a limb only to realize that I could only let it grow to the sides, and that would unbalance the tree (make the limb droop way down if I let it grow too large.) The deer solved that problem for me when they grazed it back a couple of times. But it meant I could only ever get a few apples from that sample.
I have been thinking in terms of having a given scaffold branch dedicated entirely to one variety, but it’s certainly possible to stagger varieties, or to framework new varieties off of a dedicated limb.
Can you post pictures of your young trees?
I have 2 low chill varieties,Anna and Tropical Sweet. Both are dwarfed and in their 3rd year and both are only about 4’ high. I intend to graft the Ein Shemer onto either one or the other.
Anna
This is the Gala at 7’ and I am thinking of putting the Lady Williams and the Red Fuji onto it.
The Red Granny Smith and the Sundowner onto the Granny Smith which is also at 7’. Unfortunately it has a lot of space on its trunk.
Any advice will be appreciated
Mick
Mick,
You have beautiful trees.
When my Gold Rush was 2 years old last year, I chose two scaffolds and used cleft graft to add Rubibett and Hoople’s Antique Gold to it. Cleft graft is the easiest grafting technique for me.
If I am seeing right, on the labelled branches, you cut them and grafted onto the ends and now they’ve healed? I am hoping to do that with a couple apples this year that were planted last spring.
Yes, I have several branches on Gold Rush. I picked two that I liked and cut those branches off leaving about 4" stump, could be longer. Then, I cleft- grafted them, each with a variety.
If you are new to grafting, you may want to leave a longer stump. In case your first graft fails, you can trim it off and have enough stump to regraft.
Very nice Mamuang, that is exactly what I want to do. Thanks for the photo
Mick
I’ve got to try this. I’m trying to graft several apple varieties on one apple tree. Right now all my apple trees are 2 years old. Not quite big enough, branch wise, to do some branch grafting on some of them. Maybe next year they will be big enough to do that. The branches are too small to put a scion on.
