West of the cascades you’ll only get a few days at a time when the low is 60 or higher. The average low in July and August is around 58.
Thanks, I meant 50F or higher, sorry for typo
Dennis
Interesting. I have no trouble grafting dormant plums to peach in the summer, and no luck grafting dormant peach scions. I’ve assumed because of the quality of the scion wood.
Seems better to bud graft in August with freshly harvested budwood.
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Agree they are not so interchangeable as you might think. For some reason peach scions need more heat than plum scions to callous. Plums can be grafted very early until mid August and are much more amenable to using green scions later in the summer as long as there are mature buds inside the leaf axils. I graft plums from mid March through mid August, but I do the early grafting on potted ones that I place in the greenhouse. Peaches just no point in trying too early.
Dennis
I’ll post the results in couple of months. IMO, Joereal’s formula might not work for PNW climate, H2O2 I am using is 27% much stronger than regular H2O2.
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Be careful handling that stuff.I cleaned ceilings,using about 10% Hydrogen Peroxide as a catalyst and it caused skin irritation.Treat it like an acid.
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I had very good luck doing peaches last year in the fall. Far better than my spring grafting. The spring grafts were less than 50%. My fall graft takes were almost all successfull. I did them all mid September and saw new growth before dormancy. Same trees, same scions, same whip and tongue and cleft grafts. Way different results.
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Thanks for the info, Dennis. From weather forecasts it seems that August may be best time of year for peaches here in Salem.
The last few runs of the GFS model are showing a weeklong hard freeze with lows in the low teens starting in about 10 days, so it might be a good time to check on the condition of any frost protection you’ve not yet had to pull out this winter:
This is very disappointing to me with the avocados, I was really hoping El Niño would spare them for one winter. Hopefully the models are exaggerating the severity of the cold, but it looks pretty bad…
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damn, maybe I should have waited until march to transplant my Shangjuan Lemon.
An arbitrary website from Google search predicts 3 days with lows of 25 or 26 here and daytime highs above freezing. That doesn’t sound so bad.
I hope yours ends up being warmer and not an avocado disaster.
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The next GFS went even colder, with the sounding showing lows of 14°F, 13°F, and 15°F for three nights in a row for my GPS coordinates here in West Seattle. There are huge error bars on the 10+ day model output, but still the trend in the last few is colder and colder. Looks like the jet stream might get a kink in it that will be aligned almost perfectly with the Fraser Valley, setting us up for lots of cold air in the Cascadian lowlands.
Various sites have a huge range of forecasts. Is GFS more accurate?
GFS is the main model used by weather forecasters in the U.S., so no it’s not more accurate because the smart humans who study weather often overrule what the model says. But usually if the GFS keeps trending one way, the forecasters catch up eventually.
This is the jet stream pattern it shows happening repeatedly for almost a week in mid-January, which pumps cold air down the Fraser Valley into Western WA:
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Thanks for the explanation. I see you are trying to get ahead of the information and are willing to do some parsing yourself and watch the trend.
Your post prompted me to do some searching and I’ve run accross this:The Most Accurate Weather Apps Right Now | TIME
I don’t usually think too much about the source I’m using unless it is consisently badly off like whatever my last phone was using for my homescreen app. I do have a weather station in my yard and an account with weather underground and ambientweather.com, so I can see real-time how close the temperature is to what is predicted.
According to weather.com, it will get down to 22 and I should put my winter tires on this weekend.
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The hazelnut trees are blooming everywhere I look and the bluebells are starting to come up
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Ok this is starting to get absurd. The new GFS run shows a low of 4°F on January 17. That would be pretty devastating to my avocados, and all sorts of things people have planted here over the last 70 years since the last time it got that cold. I really hope that’s just the model going haywire!
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It’s supposed to get mid to low 20s or lower on Jan 12.
(oops, I meant to post this in the HOS forum window I had open in response to another post from a local to me user)
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The latest GFS completely abandoned the jet stream kink and if this holds then there’s no freeze at all. I’ll be very happy if that was a false alarm, but will need to wait another few runs to make sure that this isn’t the outlier.
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Fairly tight boundary to the large cold air mass–100 miles NE >> SW could make a +20-degree difference.
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Just a heads up for those in the PNW, you better check your fruit trees if you intend to collect scion wood. I was intending to start harvesting scion wood around the second week of Jan. I figured this would be the appropriate time because many of my trees have only gone dormant in the last few weeks.
The weather being so warm delayed dormancy in many of my trees. I figured best to give them a bit to make sure they were fully dormant as some trees had just dropped their leaves. Taking a walkabout I now realize that for some trees I’ve delayed harvesting scion wood too long. My early varieties are already showing bud swelling and aren’t far from popping open. Those would be the early Japanese plum varieties, pluots, nectarines, and apricots.
Best to get on cutting your scion wood from your early blooming fruit trees ASAP or it may be too late if you delay. Just FYI for those intending to harvest scion.
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