I’m wondering what you all think could have happened with a heartnut tree I grafted last year. I grafted it onto a volunteer black walnut seedling. The seedling wasn’t very big, but the graft took, grew plenty well enough all last year, grew fine through the start of this year, but then when the weather turned really dry in August it died back. I thought at first maybe it was going into premature winter dormancy, but it was dead by the end of September, and then I saw it regrowing from below the graft (which wasn’t very high.) If the roots had enough energy to send up new growth shouldn’t they have been able to sustain the heartnut? Should I interpret this as marginal graft incompatibility (and give up grafting heartnut onto black walnut seedlings which are very convenient, abundant, and some already well established)?
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I know almost nothing about nut grafting, but in my mind it sounds like a graft union that wasn’t too successful. Perhaps the drought stress was too much for a weak connection to survive.
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That could well be graft incompatibility. Those grafts can grow for a while, even yrs, and then fade away, break off, or die.
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E,
I wouldn’t give up on BW as a convenient rootstock. I can’t explain why that one particular graft declined and died, but I wouldn’t necessarily chalk it up to incompatibility. I’d give it another go.
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