I t-budded some plum to one of my peach trees two years ago, only one made it. Last year, the grafted plum only grew about 1-2 inches. I even came here this spring to complain about how slow it grew. This year it finally started to grow. Boy, did it grow! Three branches came out together. This is my first graft, Is this normal? I always imagined that one branch grow out of the grafting point.
The longest branches got broken off accidentally when it was about a foot long, the remaining two branches kept growing. This is what they look now.
Japanese beetles stripped the plum leaves bare, but left peach leaves alone. So you don’t see the plum leaves in the pictures;
The whitish thing is the surround I sprayed when the peach tree was invaded by Japanese beetles.
My question is:
is it ok that more than one branch grow out the graft? Do I need to prune off one?
given the angle of the graft, do I need to support the grafted plum? If yes, how should I support the plum?
3)should I have grafted the plum on the opposite side of the peach branch?
Its common to get multiple branches from a point where there is only one spot to send shoots from. I grafted a peach last fall and its doing the same thing out of the buds - I am only letting two buds grow on a whole mature peach tree so they are pushing out all they can.
You need to take those plum branches and make a good permanent structure from them. Note you can bend them around, so you could take one and make it go the other way. I can’t tell from the pictures how the plum relates to the peach, but declare a spot on the tree where the plum will grow and remove all the peach branches competing for sun from that area and get the plum to go that way. Use as many limbs of the plum as needed to fill the area you allocate for it. It also depends how many plums vs peaches you are after long term.
Sara, before you do any more pruning, as Scott suggests, I recommend you review guidelines on where and how to cut. It looks like you’ve left quite a few stubs, which isn’t good for the tree.
Thank you, Scott and murky, for your help! I will prune off some of the nearby unwanted peach branches and take more pictures then to give you a better idea where the plum is in relationship to other peach branches.
