Hi - I’m interested in grafting some ‘different’ varieties to my apple trees (and maybe onto some wild ones with extra wood & for practice & general clandestine activity).
However for the life of me, having tried over a few weeks now, I can’t find any simple or detailed description of this… I’ve searched the web, extension bulletins, my growing number of apple & fruit books, grafting books on pdf, etc. and can find great tutorials for bench grafting to rootstocks, cleft grafting small to big branches, topworking to replace everything above the roots, chip budding, t-grafts, bridge grafting, inarching, etc, etc. … But not this (I’d think very common) practice of just adding different cultivars to an existing tree to have a mix.
I can’t even figure out if this practice has a name to search (you’d think, but I can’t tell)! Maybe it’s so simple it’s not worth mentioning in all those things I’ve seen?
I’m far enough from big cities or general culture that I don’t think there’ll be any grafting workshops within 100 miles or more (‘attend a local grafting workshop, offered frequently!’ the references say…). So I’ll have to figure this out myself via (preferably) pictures, text, and maybe u-tube videos (of which I’d bet there are many but searching for it is the hard part!). Well, like all the stuff I see for all the other types of grafting!
Can anyone help me find this very basic instruction? I guess it’d be sort of a version of Whip and Tongue bench grafting, but to an existing branch on a tree rather than a root on a bench, but guessing there might be some nuances of note useful to know about (like techniques of cutting the branch not on a bench but on the growing tree, if I use parafilm would I want wax also, etc.).
If I can at least get this figured out maybe I ought to ask if it’s too risky and I might hurt my trees at the amateur stage, etc…
In brief, I have two apple trees planted in 2021; a Wold River on seedling (quite husky by now) & a Newtown on 111. Both now have ‘pencil-sized branches’ so I’d like to graft a few things onto to try some things of interest (I’ll be out of room for more trees after 2024 plantings and as indicated above unlikely to see unusual varieties in this area other than the many great wildings). I’m mid 50s, so goal is to get things going good by the time I’m dead, perhaps a few years before even!
I’ll buy some sticks from probably Fedco.
I’ve got a few wild apples I like also but might need to prune them some to get good scionwood in later years (I’ll have 6 total apple trees in home orchard/garden next year, planted '21, 23, & 24).
Since (with luck) I’d have a bit extra from each scion grafted to my trees, I’d also like to graft to some of the wild & feral trees I know on public land (State & Nat’l forest, not parks); why not?!
In future years I’d like to graft some fantastic wild juneberry I found (to Amelanchier of course) & pear cultivars also. Maybe a plum or three too (next spring will total 9 planted). I have half a mind (that in itself probably enough of a sentence) to try a graft of some variety from another source on an existing tree of same variety just to see variety of varieties (greengage, for example).
