Dax,
Hope surgery went well for you. Glad to see you back.
I have grafted everything early but peaches. I have had success with my early grafts of pomme and all stone fruit but not peaches.
I have had fully mature peach trees ( by now it’s 10-11 years old). I started grafting on them when they were about 5 years old. The factors that I’ve noticed contributing to my spring peach grafting success have been:
healthy scionwood
graft on no more than 2-3 years old wood (not older wood than that)
consistent temperature over 65 F on the day of and 3-4 days after.
I hear you about the mature tree grafting. Not that I don’t believe you but my experience has taught me that those 3 factors are key to my success.
Dax,
I am not the only one who think peach callusing is more temperature sensotive than most other fruit trees.
I bet you @IL847 grafted her peaches when temp was higher than normal for this time of the year and held steady for several days.
I think with your hot callous pipe system, you probably would get peach grafts to take if you bench grafting them. It’ll be tough to do with field grafting, though.
I went with SkillCult’s “scarf joint” graft this year. Largely because my rootstocks were very puny this year (1/8" - 3/16") and smaller than my scion wood. I watched the knife skills video first, didn’t pay sufficient attention, still got both thumbs, but was pretty happy with how everything fit in the end. I’ll let you know how these grafts do.
The day was just trying, though.
I will be glad when we can finally move out to the property. I’m not fond of neighbors so close. Today, for instance. Everybody was outside, because it was a decent Spring Day. So I have the new neighbor next door and her whole crew tearing apart THAT house. And the young couple behind me with friends over and small children, etc.
Myself, I was out trying to get my apple trees grafted. Slightly self-consciously, as I had my camera out to see if I could get any decent video of the process.
However, in the process of trimming in the first piece of scion wood, I dropped it. Now, I have one small stick of scion wood from each of 6 heirloom varieties. Just enough to get 2 good grafts. And now I have lost one. I could not find it, even though I HEARD it hit. So I’m seriously grubbing around on the ground for it.
And a head pops over the fence. “What are you looking for?”
Me: “A stick.”
“Oh. There are some sticks over here.” And he points to the plethora of small branches that have fallen off the neighbor’s tree, which will need to be raked before we can mow. Gee, thanks.
“I’m looking for a specific stick.”
“Is it, like, your dog’s favorite?”
I wouldn’t put it past Pete to have a favorite stick, but… Rly?
“No, this is an apple stick.”
“So… it’s flavored?”
Arggghhhh!! Dude!! BUSY! “No, I’m grafting my apple trees.”
“… Did they get burnt?”
Like I have time for a botany lesson? I sketched it in, in what was probably an annoyed tone, and he gave up.
Finally found it. In the house. After I had finished up all 11 other grafts, brought them in, coated the tips with wax, and heeled them in. I will much prefer to do this withOUT the live, studio audience.
@MikeC ,
The post of your early Fuji last fall finally confirmed that the Fuji I have is a wrong variety.
So, I had enough of this poor quality, very late ripening Fuji. I grafted 16 varieties on it the other day. A total of varieties of this tree is 18. I think that’s about right.
Grafts I did two weeks ago have leaves pushing! and several buds pushing on my to-be-franken-tree. Grafts took on at least the most vigorous varieties, now to see if the trees grow well. I am working on building extra beds this week, and getting them filled and nets.
When do I get these into the nursery beds? How long do I wait with them inside? What definitely is pushing are the roots/scions. What is a bit behind, but seem to have taken are the interstems. I will have extra graft material on those(rubbers/buddy tape), do I need to remove below-ground materials?
Well, I checked my records. I did my pears grafting on March 7 when we had seasonal warm 50 to mid 60 weather for several days. Checking these grafts a little over a month late, all grafts are take. (All were cleft graft if I don’t specify). On March 22, we had temperatures in upper 60s for few days, I grafted plum/pluot. 3 weeks late , they all show certain degrees of growing except a chip budding and one my experimental no name grafting method. On April 3, 4, I grafted peaches. We had a week of most 70s, few days mid to upper 60s temperature. Most of peach grafts show sign of growing now. But peach grafts are still too soon to tell. I will wait for couple more of weeks to update
I think I’m just about done with grafting for this year. Maybe one or two more, we’ll see.
So far:
Ashmead’s Kernel
Blenheim Orange
Orleans Reinette
St. Edmund’s Pippin
Windham Russet
Beurre Clairgeau
Cabot of Vermont (pear)
Dana Hovey
Louise Bonne d’Avranches
All cleft grafts done with utility knife, parafilm, and electrical tape. Very basic and there were definitely things that I could have done more adroitly, but had pretty good results last year, so we’ll see how everything turns out.
