Loquat and pear grafted onto hawthorn

General Fruit Growing
#1

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this picture that i took a month ago is too confusing.

pot 1 (which you can see) has a hawthorn rootstock variety (noid) with small red fruits that my friend brought with him from italy. last year i grafted a loquat and a pear (d’anjou, upper left in pic) onto it. i was surprised how much the scions grew. the plum scion, however, was a complete fail.

pot 2 (behind pot 1) also has the same rootstock variety, but a long time ago a different hawthorn variety (noid) with bigger fruit was grafted onto it. this is the plant in the upper right in the pic. my friend eats the fruit.

not sure if this pic i took last december will help…

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it’s easier to see the leaves of the rootstock hawthorn.

when i did the grafting i kept like 50 cuttings of the rootstock. i dipped them in rooting hormone and potted them. maybe 1 or 2 took. i’m pretty sure it suckers from the roots though so guess i’ll wait for the pot to fill up with suckers and then divide them. assuming it’s a good rootstock in the long run.

i’m relatively new to grafting but i still can’t get over how much of a mad scientist it makes me feel like when there’s such a big superficial difference between the rootstock and the scions. is an angry mob with pitchforks going to come after me any second? do i enjoy feeling like a mad scientist? am i a mad scientist at heart? honestly in plenty of movies and shows i do find myself rooting for the mad scientists.

around the same time i did these grafts, i also grafted loquats onto a different friend’s indian hawthorn. they took but i don’t think that they’ve grown as much.

when two different species are graft compatible, then there’s a chance that they are also cross compatible. it’s probably a small chance. one issue with loquats is that they tend to bloom when no one else is blooming. in theory the pollen could be frozen, but that seems too involved. can we vote for somebody to do it? i nominate @a_Vivaldi.

i’d like to try grafting other species onto the little red fruit hawthorn. should i try my lost id asian pear? last year i successfully grafted it onto my evergreen pear. should i try an apple? since the plum didn’t work, does this mean it’s unlikely for anything that can be crossed with plums to work (ie cherries and apricots)?

a year ago when researching this topic, this forum came up the most, which is why i ended up joining. you folks are the most interested in the topic? do you identify as “mad scientist”?

grafting and hybridizing are high up on the list of things i wish that i started doing a long time ago. who can i blame? you? why didn’t you tell me? because you didn’t know me? so i should only blame the people who did know me? i really don’t mind blaming all my teachers. i do mind blaming my grandfather. it doesn’t seem copacetic blaming him. after all, he taught me everything he knew about gardening. unfortunately he didn’t know about grafting or hybridizing.

i want to say it’s a moot point, but now that i know about grafting and hybridizing, is someone going to blame me for not sharing this useful knowledge with them?

all gardening knowledge isn’t equally useful. ideally there should be a way for us to make it very difficult to overlook the most useful gardening knowledge. like voting?

https://www.reddit.com/r/gardening/top/?t=all

let me know how far down you have to scroll before you find a post about grafting or hybridizing. then again, perhaps i’m overestimating the usefulness of these things?

alternatively, let’s imagine if we used donations to rank forum categories. in this case perhaps i’d make the biggest donations for a grafting category and a hybridizing category. because there’s nothing worse than someone failing to realize their mad scientist potential.

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#2

I love the mad scientist vibes … might get a kick out of reading this guys story too.

Inspired me to try some of my own. Serviceberries - i have three from seed - will need another year to graft onto. The chokecherries I’ve got a number of grafts onto them using stone fruit.

Your hawthorn is going to mostly work in the apple pear and quince range of fruits. Maybe medlars and serviceberries too. Possibly aronia even. But there are so many factors, including sap flow time and bud break time and so on that ALSO cause graft failure even when the genetics are comaptible.

Last year, end of summer plum on wild chokecherry.

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#3

i have 6 types of pears growing happily on a 6ft mountain ash. also have Sierra pear on a Ivans belle hybrid mountain ash. grafted several apricots on my black ice plum and several black ice plum grafted onto my romance cherries. i have tons of wild chokecherry/ pin cherry around me. ill try black ice on them also. i have lots of scions in the fridge.

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#4

Haha, I appreciate the nomination.

While I’m all about doing wide crosses, I might not be your man for loquat. It’s too cold for them here too set and hold fruit. Unless and until I get my hands on Piera loquat, I’m not going to be able to do any breeding work with them, sadly.

That being said, I’ve considered a few oddball crosses involving late winter/early spring ripening rosaceae. But it’ll be a few years still before I have time for that sort of idle curiosity breeding work.

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#5

What’s the deal with the piera loquat? I’ve never heard of it. Does that make a difference in your zone?

Have you considered doing loquat in a greenhouse? I’ve seen specimens around here that people keep short and bushy. That size would fit well in a greenhouse.

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#6

Often people graft loquat on quince if they want it more dwarfed like that. I think loquat on loquat is harder to keep small, at least from what I’ve heard. Not personal experience.

I do wonder what the vigor would be like on hawthorn (if compatible long-term), maybe also dwarfing? There are many species of “hawthorn” too, so I wonder if some might work better than others.

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#7

Some people claim that Adara or Prunus americana are beneficial as interstems. Not sure if you have access to either but be fun to try. I have test bench grafted on to chokecherry, tartarian cherry, green gage, moyer plum, umpqua italin plum, apricot, a neighbors cherry, nectarine, an elberta. Just for fun. Apricot is the only one that hasnt had much bud swell. None look dead … yet.

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#8

You’re more of an expert than I but I suspect sap flow rates influence dwarfing and if they’re at the wrong time or too low - it causes what looks like incompatibility. Hawthorn, saskatoon or serviceberry, and aronia all have dwarfing on pears I believe.

#9

If your constrained on space I understand not trying but if you have room, I wouldn’t be so sure you won’t ever get fruitset there. I’d imagine every other year you’d get a few fruit at least that are less exposed, maybe even a bumper crop from time to time. But you’d mostly be correct however it’s such a gorgeous tree that it’s worth growing ornamentally imo. Loquat is one of the things I feel obligated to push on people around here as almost no one has heard of it. I’ve also never heard of that variety

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#10

It’s not available in North America. It’s a recent bud sport found in Spain that flushes new flower buds and blooms multiple times a year. Presumably, people living in zones where loquat is hardy but unable to produce fruit (so, like zone 7 through 9a) would be about to get a harvest off of it’s spring flush.

Which sure seems pretty dang amazing. I’d love to grow loquat fruit, and I’m sure lots of other people would too.

That being said, loquat is on the USDAs highly restrictive NAPPRA list. Given that, it’s quite likely that Piera will never be imported, as (to the best of my understanding) any import permit will be automatically denied. Loquat would have to first be delisted from NAPPRA. That listing doesn’t restrict seeds though, or material from Canada.

Pretty much the only possible way to get that cultivar here, short of an unlikely delisting, would be for someone to import it into Canada, and then file an import permit in the US for the stock in Canada. Or for someone to file an import permit for Piera seeds directly from Europe, and just hope and pray the trait is passed on.

Anyone who’s actually dealt with APHIS is encouraged to correct me of I misunderstood the process.

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#11

There was a discussion of this cultivar in the PNW thread previously, and I was able to dig up the full text of the original research paper. The TLDR version is that the spring/summer flush produced “inedible” fruit about 1/6th the size of normal fruit, that seem to have failed to properly ripen (at least they didn’t measure brix, etc, for those fruit like they did the others). Here’s the first post in that thread where I quote the paper, there is another quote a few posts below with more info too:

As noted in that thread, it’s possible you could get them to ripen via thinning and/or removal of the flowers in the other flushes, but the researchers didn’t try that.

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#12

That’s good to know. Always a catch…

Thinning might change things, as might the failure to set a winter crop as happens here. If the spring/summer crop is the only one the tree actually sets, would it still be poor? It’d also be quite interesting to know how much the everflowering trait is passed on to seedlings.

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#13

I was just reading that loquat grafted to quince c rootstock has a max height of 2 meters. I wonder if growing those in a container would provide good fruit yields? Is a tree with a max size that short what sometimes people refer to as a patio dwarf?

While I’m not yet over the moon with the possibility, perhaps the Rose-Ann or Piera might be worth trying outdoors in colder zones. Even if the fruit is commercially inferior it might be good enough for diehard loquat lovers to scratch the itch. As a kid I remember encountering loquat trees with fruit that was mostly seed and very little flesh. Admittedly, they weren’t great, but at least still had proper loquat flavor. Eating a couple handfuls of those was satisfying. But I’m like a goat with fruits and veggies, and will eat pretty much anything and like it.

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#14

Or for the rebellious types, finding a tree during their visit to Spain, snipping a few branches, and sending those back home via DHL. Oh, and hoping it passes through customs. Considering the amount of narcotics that easily enter the US this way I’d say it’s quite likely the scions would make it to your fridge back home.

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#15

Stole the words right out of my mouth. One of my coworkers is Portuguese and when her family moved here and she was a kid, her Dad kept a long thin grape scion from a local Vineyard, sewed up in the hem of his suit jacket when they went thru customs. That grape vine allegedly is still growing 10m plus at a house near Cerritos, CA.

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#16

True, but pretty dang risky.

The reason it’s illegal to import is because it’s a host of a citrus borer beetle that as of yet hasn’t established in the US, though it did show up a few times in shipments. It has a pretty big host range so it could be troublesome. I don’t know that Piera would be with the trade for longhorn citrus beetle…

Moreover, there’s the Feds. The USDA can be pretty mean to people who they catch breaking their import restrictions. I believe they now have the power to strip people of commercial licenses in addition to whatever fines they impose.

From what I’ve read about the subject, they also read forums like this one, specifically to find people trying to skirt the rules. So shhh

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#17

I love stories like that.

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#18

I don’t doubt they would fine you if they caught you. I still give your chances of success as very high. Lastly, I’m not telling people to do it, merely stating that it is definitely done and the vast majority don’t get caught.

I guarantee the feds aren’t sitting on the growing fruit forum, or any forum for that matter, waiting to hear about someone bringing a few scions into the country illegally. They are looking for major trafficking operations. Short of a customs agent just lucking into finding it during a standard audit or getting tipped off, they aren’t going to find out. The percentage of packages with illegal drugs that enter the country everyday proves that ICE is not an omnipotent, omniscient entity.

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#19

That’s fair. My impression is that they do pay a fair amount of attention to certain forums like for rare succulent and cactus collectors because there’s so much money in poaching stuff these days, especially in southern California and the adjacent areas of Mexico.

#20

I would suspect that working a lead, knowing a target, is how they end up perusing social media. Nevertheless, I wish fish and game in California was more successful in their interdiction of poaching along the north coast, because they’ve done virtually nothing to curtail illegal taking of abalone and succulents here.

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