Checked a bunch of my grafts today, and found four of the peaches and one cot with growing buds. Following your experience, I will consider these successful 
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Nice! My plums and apricots are really taking off but the peaches I am only seeing minute movement on a couple. I still am optimistic on them with the weather but I have gotten unpleasant surprises before with peach grafting. The peach stocks were less further along than they usually are for my grafts, only now are the peaches in full bloom. The plum/cot were well into full bloom when I grafted.
BTW this weekend looks like another potentially good peach window. I will probably use up the rest of the scionwood I have, maybe save one bit of each variety as a backup.
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If scions store properly,it can last very long.I have a bag of scion that was forgotten in the back of top shelves of the refrigerator. Th cambium still green early this year. Of course I don’t think I will use them for grafting but store them till June should not be a difficult task.
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Yup! My high is a bit less on Friday so I will probably graft Saturday. Given that it is cloudy I would prefer a touch warmer (80 high 65 low) to be absolutely ideal but its about as close as can be expected.
@ILParadiseFarm, I don’t think spring peach grafting was ever done commercially in the US. Peaches of NY for example in the early 1900’s says spring grafting is “most difficult” and all peaches are budded (or grown from root cuttings). Probably a few people tried it and got the conditions off one year and lost a lot of money. For this reason there is little information out there on how to succeed with spring grafting of peaches.
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Non of my grafts are breaking the parafilm yet. I see some bud swell inside parafilm but not enough to break it. Any day now ! I hope.
How many layers of parafilm can they break through?
Not sure. I always make sure there’s only one layer of parafilm right on the bud. When I wrap I only go over the bud once but go in between buds several times.
When do yo remove the Aluminum foil Scott? I’d think that when a bud starts showing tiny green growth, those tiny leaves need the sun to grow more.
Right, as soon as there is definite growth.
I see a tiny bit of movement on some peaches this evening. Hopefully I will see more soon.
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Looks like it will be a while before I can attempt a graft here, but this thread sure has been helpful. Thank you!
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Grafted Indian Free peach onto my Reliance peach today! I did two bud grafts as an experiment in addition to three cleft grafts - really liked bud grafts and might try to do more of them. If just one takes I will be happy. Weather is expected to be high 70’s and low 60s for the next three days.
As a side note, I have a ton of side shoots on my scaffolds. Do I need to thin them out at all?
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I would strip all of those shoots flowers etc off, if you are not saving them they will just be competition. If you want to keep the base variety just keep a few buds in the appropriate spots. A couple shoots left lower down probably won’t be a problem but trees feed the healthy buds more than the half-there ones so your grafts have a chance of starving out if there is too much competition.
Here is one of my peaches from a week ago just barely budding out now:
I know this is a good one partly based on experience - its green and its coming right in the middle where the leaf bud is on a peach. Right now maybe 1/4th of my peaches are showing this kind of thing, a few are a bit further along than this one.
Note I am not showing this tree but this scaffold is competely stripped. The other scaffold I trimmed to about a foot of budding shoot total, I will probably graft that part over tomorrow and remove every single bud from it. It could be the graft would tolerate a bit more competition but I’ve lost too many things from competition. You can also have the problem with multiple grafts at the same time that one graft will out-compete the other. So in some cases your plan to add five varieties at once will end up being only three. For apples and plums this is usually not a problem but it can be a problem for peaches and persimmons amongst others.
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That explains why two of my last year grafts grew only a few inches for the whole of last year. Neighboring branches grew a dozen or two.
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One week later - I’m 0 for 11 as far as seeing any green buds. Not even the apples!!!
Starting to wonder if I got bad scionwood. I would think even a failed graft would be trying to wake up. At least the Apple.
Most of my pluots and plums grafts showed green leaves now after two weeks.
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That makes me feel a bit better, but it’s been in the 70s most of this week. Just on temperature alone, I’m surprised nothing is happening after a week.
What have your temps been like?
I grafted at 60 degrees for a week and a half and the last few days in the upper 40s. Warming up on Monday again in the upper 60s.
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I’m not sure about that. I did a William’s Pride Apple graft more than a week ago. The wood was as fresh as it comes since I harvested from my other tree and grafted within 10 minutes. I haven’t seen any movement on those yet.
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