Absolutely-- the bark must be slipping, so it must be attempted during active growth.
1 Like
@zendog, I believe we have someone here that did that with an apple. He grafted a scion on upside down by accident. In the short term it did work! Buds grew downward initially and then bent upwards to produce quite horizontal branch growth. I’ll dig around on the forum and find out the long term health of the scion.
1 Like
Wasn’t that seedy that grafted upside down?
I found the post by Seedy that I am thinking of in the first time grafters thread but I couldn’t figure out to past it here
Use the little chain link button below his post, then copy and paste that link. And maybe we’ll call out @Seedy this way, and he’ll update us when he gets an email notification!
1 Like
Looks like it died, possibly was just pushing growth from the scion but the bump may have broken it loose also
I have 2 figs that I think I’ll try BAP with. Do you know if BAP is used on stone fruit trees ever to promote branching in certain directions? I have a close planting of 3 peaches and would prefer all the growth branching towards the outside and not the middle.
I have thought of this too, but in a different way. I imagine that one way you might do this with less risk of killing the tree would be to bridge-graft in scions of the interstem around the trunk one year. After they take you could come back in the next year and remove the vigorous bark and let the bridge grafts do the work.
I have some burr-knots on M7 4 year old trees that I’m considering doing this to. I figure if i were to use Geneva scions it might also increase the productivity of my trees. My Zestar on M7 probably needs M27 scions. Although it is a precocious scion for me, it is also extremely vigorous.
I don’t see why it wouldn’t work on stone fruit. Searching online growers use the BAP plant hormone on just about everything.
2 Likes
Hi all, I did indeed have an accidental upside down graft for a while; actually for a few months, so I don’t think it was just the scion staying alive on it’s own (but I know little of these things). It did eventually fade out, after I bumped and jarred it one day, and I have a theory about that (because I saw it happen on one other graft) which is that the toilet ring wax that I used becomes essentially liquid at a very low temperature and the two grafts in question may have become too warm too soon after the graft and the wax melted down into the divide. One shaky part of this theory is that my seven grafts (five of which were successful) were mostly of the same type (veneer) and were in similar physical situations, though, around here just South-facing compared to any-other-direction-facing could make quite a difference…meaning that this theory is just a wild guess. I’ve tried another type of grafting (chip) but I won’t know the results until next Summer. I hope to start collecting scions pretty soon and do much more grafting in the future but so far I’ve not done much.
Keep trying and you will soon be a pro grafter.
Indeed, I hope to be. I have found a hedgerow apple tree with tough-skinned but very tasty apples and I hope to get scions from it soon. Also, I live very near the NCGR Corvallis facility and hope to acquire scions from there. I have limited space to plant trees and have planned to turn each one into a multi-tree.
1 Like
@zendog, I’ve had some time to cogitate upon the subject of the upside down graft. I don’t believe it should work. Let me explain my reasoning. First let’s go back to bark inversion. When you peal the bark off you are leaving the cambium layer intact on the tree trunk. On the bark you peal off you have the phloem layer. Underneath the cambium layer on the trunk is the xylem layer. The xylem of course carries water and nutrients up from the roots, which sustains the topstock and the phloem carries sugars and such from the top to the roots. Inverting the bark disrupts the phloem layers and this is where the dwarfing effect comes from — essentially it is starving the roots, while transporting nutrients upwards normally. See Sax and Dickson. Journal of the Arnold Arboretum Vol. 37, No. 2 (April 1956), pp. 173-179. Flipping over the whole scion reverses the polarity of both the xylem and phloem – So both top and rootstocks are starving. I’d like to be proven wrong though!
1 Like
@Seedy thanks for the paper. Sax indicates he also used upside down budding. That should work because only the phloem layer is inverted. The last paragraph of p. 74 describes something that is just crazy. An approach graft is made between two trees to form an arch, insert an upside down bud just after the graft, then cut off the tree beyond the bud graft, leaving you with an upside down interstem. Is there a follow up on this? This bulletin indicates it was something they “would” do. I wonder how it turned out?
The thing about me and grafting is that I’m amazed that it works at all. I was told early on (not very long ago) to ‘just try it’ and see. With most things I try, I attempt to do everything just right at first, but soon I’m doing whatever random things come to mind. Have fun, learn some stuff, try some stuff, post results. Make the Arnoldians proud. I’ve eaten one apple and one fig so far off of the trees I’ve planted. My goal: get more.
3 Likes
I agree with this mentality wholeheartedly. My son and I knocked a Williams Pride whip and tongue graft off the graft site this spring after it started growing. But I still had scions in the fridge. I T-budded a chip of WP onto the same branch around June 1 and it was the most vigorous graft I had. T-budding as I understand it seems to usually be for summer and new growth buds. But T-budding a dormant bud a full 5 weeks after bloom seemed to work fine. So I also say try stuff outside the norm (especially with apples) and see what works for you.
3 Likes
Chip budding is normally done at that time (early spring/late winter) – I probably would have gone w/ a chip. But hey, if you have slipping bark and a mature live bud you’ve met all the requirements for a T-bud.
Yeah, it seems the chip bud is indicated in that situation. The t-bud was iffy for a while, but it is nearly sealed up over the end of the stock now on account of the very vigorous growth through the summer.
The benefit of the t-bud method is that novices like myself don’t need to make as many cuts to get the stock and scion bud to match cambiums correctly. I didn’t have much wood on the stock branch or scion to work with so a screw-up would have been the end of that graft.