Grafts healing over trunks and covering exposed wood, experience, advice, techniques

[Trav]

One of the biggest problems with grafting even relatively small branches and trunks is how to heal them over without leaving exposed wood or for the bark around the graft to die back leaving areas vulnerable to infection for years.

Here I’d like to share my experience, which will not surprise our experienced friends and mentors here, and I’d love for you to show of your success and unsuccess stories.

This is a multi-trunk apple that I grafted-over mostly with a wonderful unknown variety that my parents planted, perhaps EverCrisp, in 4 years it completely closed over on three separate 4-5 inch trunks. I’m not sure I have pictures of the newly made grafts but these are from early in the next season, I read the bad advice of making 2 bark grafts, and figured I was brand new so I did 4, only the one where all 4 survived has completely healed over, or 98% I can’t tell if there’s a little hole in the middle or if it’s closed up inside.

This was just a few weeks later and I tied down all the shoots, and did almost no pruning, unfortunately in the following years, I was away and without pruning they didn’t continue with this shape.

This is how they’ve healed up now with almost 5 whole growing seasons later, and only the one where all four grafts survived closed up, but the others are doing well and I expect them to close in one or two more years, with God’s continued blessings.

In my opinion the worst thing about the shape of the trees is how much they’ve grown into each other, but nature planted two clusters of apples that close together and I just worked with what I was gifted.

I ate my first fruit that I grafted off of this tree and it’s one of the first trees I ever grafted, it’s nice to see the success, but I hope I can do it again and care for them correctly next time.

Please share your graft healing stories and tips! I would especially love to see pictures of large diameter trunks healing over.

[Trav]

This is another apple that I grafted in the same year, and despite nearly 5 seasons of growth the cleft graft where only one survived still hasn’t closed, whereas the one where both sides survived closed over in less than 2 seasons.

These photos are from the second season and once the branch has closed over, I cut the majority of the Scion off, except one outfacing bud.

Now with another 3½ seasons of growth it’s looking great despite the short branch left on the second scion dying back the callous from the second scion is alive and incorporated into the first.

Here can see the graft where only one scion loved and it’s still not healed over and still not caught up to the size of the host branch.

I’ll share pictures later but I don’t recommend standard cleft grafts, but modified cleft grafts with bark flaps are great.

[Joao]

Really interested to follow this thread. I’ve had mixed results with wound sealant, some grafts callus over fine without it and others just seem to stall. The ones I left completely uncovered on young wood generally did better than the ones I painted over, but on older thicker trunks I’ve had exposed wood linger for years and eventually rot inward. Looking forward to seeing what others have tried.

[TNHunter]

My first graft.. Gerardi mulberry scions bark grafted to a 3 inch mulberry stump.

Late summer it looked like this.

We had a thunderstorm with some hard wind.. and it broke off 3 of the 4 scions.

Wind protection/support is a must for a year or two.

It looks like this today. That one scion turned into a nice little tree.

It has not healed over that flat completely yet.. but is making progress.

TNHunter