That’s not an easy question to answer, but I’m glad that you asked. I’ve recently been going along with the assumption that everything I do will work and churning out a lot of grafts. The last time I was feeling confidant and did that (3-4 years ago), I had ~100/101 peach & nectarine grafts fail
I meticulously keep track of everything I graft (all 2174 grafts…), but I don’t have good follow-up data on later success. There have been times in the past when I recorded which grafts took and which failed. During one year, I even recorded how much they grew by mid-July.
Much of the data isn’t so useful here due to a lack of differentiation and limited sample. These examples don’t necessarily show that tiny is good, but that I most often screw up with larger scions.
2016 pears: 28/29 grew (failure was a VL- Very Large scion)
2016 Euro plums: 20/22 grew (failures of Med-Lg and Lg scions)
2017- Jujube 19/20 grew (VLwas failure)
I suspect that the reason for this is that with thinner scions, I am able to compensate for my poor wood-working skills by pulling the slightly mismatched wood together. But with larger wood, it is more likely that even pulling hard could leave a gap in poorly fit grafts (which I generate plenty of). Most of the above grafts were cleft grafts, with a few double-clefts thrown in.
I did find one period where there was a bit more failures. Interestingly, it was with apples, something which I normally have high success levels (95%+).
April 2016 apple grafts
Size |
Grafts |
Takes |
Pct |
Avg Growth |
Thin |
4 |
3 |
75% |
1” |
Medium Thin |
8 |
7 |
88% |
4” |
Medium |
7 |
6 |
86% |
9.2” |
Medium Large |
8 |
5 |
63% |
6.7” |
Large |
9 |
3 |
33% |
2” |
Small sample size (most things a single person does will be…), but it seems like the medium wood produced the best growth. This actually surprised me a bit, as I would have thought Medium-Large or even large was best. I think I’ve suspected that VL may be non-optimal (though there weren’t any in these 36 grafts), due to the number of times I’ve felt unhappy about the contact in a VL graft.
I should also further qualify the above by:
1.) I don’t know offhand the exact diameters for each of the sizes, as it is something I do by eye. When I’m next grafting, maybe I’ll use a ruler and get some approximate figures.
2.) Even if you trust the above results, it doesn’t necessarily apply to jujube. I’ll try to capture the data on my jujube grafting this year (185 total, with 27 being potted or un-established, like suckers, etc).
I’ll do some measurements, but I’m pretty sure that I consider Large to be far less than 1/2". Maybe this just highlights my reliance of smushing wood together rather than making a high-quality precision match…
I’ve had that happen, but even in that situation, I can usually narrow it down to 2 or at most 3 possibilities.
I’ve also been re-evaluating how many varieties I should put on a tree, because it makes things so complicated. I’m actually leaning toward trying to keep things to 5 or 6 varieties (original host, and one for each compass point, with maybe one more for the upper central leader).
I’ve noticed that things seem to get pretty messy when I have too many and I risk either losing varieties through pruning or losing a ton (too many eggs in one basket) if the tree dies (I lost 20+ apple varieties one time when tree died…).
I don’t have such skills either, but I can enter data in a spreadsheet
I use my phone to record the info, then transcribe it into Excel each night.