I left the top one, because I’ve read that you should have a shoot above the graft to help “pull” the sap up into it.
That lower one was just a leftover piece. Just threw it there for the hell of it.
Also the one shoot behind it (that has a lot of blooms) is another scaffold entirely.
There is something called a nurse limb which is on the side, but not dominant to the graft. Maybe this was for some other kind of plant? For peaches that looks like a recipe for failure. I did that on some of my early grafts (not by intention, I just didn’t know any better) and they failed. Every type of plant varies in how much they tolerate competition wen grafting. Persimmons are by far the worst, any growth is bad and needs to be immediately rubbed off. I have found peaches worse than e.g. apples but not as bad as persimmons.
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Ok. I’ll try to get out there tomorrow and lop it off.
81 degrees F, very milky sky, but some sun.
Now I’m concerned they will get TOO hot.
What about on a full grown tree where I was going to replace one scaffold limb with a different variety, much like the picture you showed earlier in this tread? Does that have a chance of working if it is not the dominant branch? Give it a shot and see?
If its a big scaffold it will usually be OK… my guide is the scaffold I am grafting over must be bigger than what I left, also it needs to be grafted higher than you might otherwise do to increase dominance.
One of the grafts I did this weekend was top working my Early Crawford. It was about 80% EC but 20% of the tree is Baby Crawford and I am keeping that. I am grafting about 5’ off the ground to help compensate for the fact that 20% of the tree will remain. Also on that picture above there is one scaffold I didn’t graft over. I did prune nearly all of it off though, only one small branch is left.
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Done. Lopped it off today.
It looks like the weekend weather was really good, I already see the apricots and plums I did on Saturday going. Here is the apricot poking through:
BTW this is another thing I like about Doc Farwell’s, you can see the very early signs of growth whereas under the parafilm its harder to spot.
I sort of wished I had done the peaches on Saturday now, it got cold Sat evening but probably not enough to matter. It would have given one more good day.
I put foil on a few random grafts to see if it mattered, so far the foil ones may be a bit ahead of the others. For the last two days its mostly cloudy so no need for foil.
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Sorry for all the questions Scott, honestly you should write a book. I’d buy it.
Are you still wrapping your peach and apricot scions in parafin before painting over them. I can’t tell by the picture.
I plan to do my first bark grafts tomorrow for the peach and apricot. I’m also going to try a few cleft grafts.
Thanks
I haven’t wrapped them in parafilm for a long time. The Docs keeps them from drying out so its redundant to wrap it. If you don’t have Docs the parafilm works about as well if you wrap them well and tightly, but as you can see above its easier to see initial growth with Docs.
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Even with it hitting 84 yesterday? I didn’t foil mine, was worried they got too hot.
84 without sun is fine, its the 84 plus sun thats the problem. Still I wished I had foiled all of mine right after I grafted them as added insurance.
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There was some sun early in the day, but temps were still in the 70s at the time.
I grafted a couple of sticks of red skin last night, I figured I would spread my grafts out over several days, I got a nice amount of scion from a member that was good sized, feeling confident I will get some takes
Here I thought we would run mostly on the cool side of ideal, and it turns out we were
on the warm side of ideal.
Is that “real” growth, or is it just pushing off of the energy in the scion at this point?
I find stone fruits almost never push if there is not at least a partial take. Sometimes they push and then die, but when I take apart the graft in that case I see a partially calloused scion at least. Quick takes like this also are not common on most grafts, its only stone fruits that I ever get such quick takes and even there its not common – the conditions have to be just right. My apples I did over a week ago and they are still doing nothing.
Note that none of my peaches are doing anything yet, but pretty much all the plums are now showing signs of life.
So as far as difficulty for stone fruit is this accurate, from hardest to easiest?
Peach > apricot > cherry > plum (both types)
Yes, thats about right…