It’s been thirteen days since I grafted the first batch. A few show good signs of taking. Here is a contender
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I did 30 peach grafts this year, half with aluminum foil and half without. Everything that’s pushing growth had the foil on it, so I’m a believer.
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You just made a believer out of me.
Dont give up on the non foil ones they might just be a little slower to grow.
Can’t argue with that! I wonder whether the foil helps more with keeping it from drying out. Did you have some other anti-drying protection (paint or tape on the whole scion)? If not then the foil may have had the primary benefit of keeping the scions hydrated longer. The UV could also be damaging.
I had parafilm on the scions, and electrical tape holding the graft together. It got in the 80’s a few days and has been very sunny, so it’s very possible that I cooked some of them.
It has been slow going but the first peaches I grafted are looking pretty good. I think it has been a little hot for them. Here are a few photos of the best looking
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Not sure if this qualifies as a success yet since it’s only been two weeks, but this is a stick of Loring grafted to my peach of unknown variety…seems promising.I did approximately 10 peach grafts on the 5th of May. It got up to 86 that day and then 90 the following day as we went into a pretty warm stretch with no rain.
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Congrats! Too early to party but thats a good sign.
Did it cool down after those first few hot days? A couple hot days is probably OK as the nights will be in the 70s and perfect for callousing. But too many hot days will dry out the scions.
Yes, the evenings cooled to the mid-60’s, but the days were all low to mid 80’s with a spike or two into the 90’s for the time between the grafting and when we finally got some rain on Monday.
Keeping a close eye on the others for signs of life.
I confess I still am a bit puzzled as two years ago I grafted at a similar period as far as growth and weather goes and had really bad results. Maybe you had less sun on the grafts. In any case we are getting lots of good data to chew on here!
This tree is for the most part west facing and you can see from the picture that there is a fence pretty close by. The days between when I grafted and this Monday when it started to rain were all pretty much sunny, maybe a few clouds here and there. Wondering if the fence helped shield it a bit.
7 peach/nectarine and 1 apricot grafted three weeks ago and only on green leaf. Scion fully wrapped in paraffin tape or wax and aluminum foil. Did mostly spice grafts this time. High temperatures:
69,57,62,59,53,75,84,82,79,73,63,72,68,70,60,71,60,54,64,76,64. 12 days with highs below 70 and not much sun. Wish I new which ones won’t take so I can re-graft. 10 day forecast still cool weather with 5 of the days below 70 and highest 75…
EDIT: Started grafting 4/26 and results have again been disappointing. Did 4 peaches and 4 nectarines and after 30 days only see green on 2 out of the 8. Hopefully those two will survive.
I would give it another week. I did two seedling peaches. 5 scions on one tree and 4 scions on the other. I was at 80% and 50% take rate on those. But last couple of days the rest of the grafts all started to show growth, putting me at 100% for both trees. Hopefully they’ve really taken. The grafts that were taking time we’re done on 4/21. So it took almost 4 weeks.
None of the grafts I did on my big peach tree took. Probably because the tree is on its death bed.
My peach, plum, apricot, cherry scions grafted two weeks ago all leaf out, how long should I wait to make sure they are truly taken?
That sounds like the kind of weather I had failures in the past on, cool without much sun. But as Susu says I would wait a bit longer. I had one graft take three weeks to get going this year. In hot weather you can give up after three weeks but in cool weather the wood is viable for longer.
@IL847, peach grafts love to stall and die, especially if they have competition. I would say at 1" leaf the odds get pretty small of a stall and as the leaves approach full sized the odds of a stall become about zero.
Thanks, Scott. I hope /pray they will all pass 1" leaf , then I can give them each a permanent tag
Silver lining to all the rain we’ve had is that the peach grafts aren’t drying out…spotted a couple more that are showing signs of life…
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Following up on my grafts of 18 days ago (May 5th). These I just did for experiments. I didn’t have any good scions left unfortunately, and the stocks were munched by deer last year, so it might not be the best test but I got 0/3 on them it looks like. The highs were 72-66-74-73-77-…similar for some time. It wasn’t very sunny for the first two days, then it was sunny for three etc. It may have been a bit too cool those first couple of days, it was mostly in the high 50’s if you look at the hourly graphs.
So, not a whole lot of reliable data but perhaps a little negative news for cool and cloudy.
My older grafts are all doing well now, they are finally starting to put on vigorous growth.
@jeremymillrood it would be interesting to know how many hours a day that fence was shielding your tree. That might have helped give you better grafting temperatures.
Not sure how much affect the fence had…temps were consitently upper mid upper 70’s to mid-80’s with overcast skies or rain almost the entire time since I posted that…In fact,I think we may have had only two or 3 days of sun in the last 2 1/2 weeks, so really not much for the fence to shield…