Couple more questions i’m doubting my self on.
Scionwood. Would it be better to push the harvest date up by a few weeks. Currenty I wait for the coldest day in mid February to harvest scionwood. But I could wait until the beginning of March, our peaches are still dormant then in zone 7A.
Should I harvest two year old scionwood wood? Currently my focus is on one year old, but a couple lengths of two year old may make it to the bag. Does age one year vs two year make any differnce?
Thanks
With the variations in winter weather we have experienced, I would pay more attention in future years to what the vegetation is telling! I normally wait until mid Feb to cut all scions and usually that works for stonefruit, but this winter, my plum and peach buds began swelling in January, and I could not wait to get the best quality. So I will be watching carefully in 2026, beginning in Mid January and I have my cherry plum which always beats the others to watch. When it begins to swell buds, I will cut all stonefruit scions immediately since I prefer them to be fully dormant.
As to two year old wood, I would prefer to use the one year old wood for grafting. The bud spacing is more consistent and viable.
Dennis
Kent, Wa
I see several sunny days not long after you grafted there. You don’t need 70 air but you need 70 on the grafts. Look up peach callous studies, they measured this in a lab.
I have had many failures at lower temps. My guess is it was not sunny, but I didn’t know that could matter back when I tried it so I didn’t pay attention to the sun.
I just started grafting last year and didn’t know I was suppose to wait for the temperature to reach a certain point. I’ve started grafting whenever I see the host or rootstock buds starts swelling, figuring that if nutrients are being sent up the tree then the scions will get some too. Pretty close to all my early grafts eventually leaf out, pears/plums/cherries are usually first and then eventually persimmons and jujubes later. Early grafting mid-late March seems to work for me in my area. It could be there were very sunny days within the week of grafting but I’m pretty sure there are nights that dips into the low 30s after the grafts were done. Btw, once my grafts leaf out I followed the recommendation to remove all competing shoots and buds below the grafts.
I’ve already tried several times as I wrote above, and it failed every time. The next time I graft peaches I will try to look for some colder temps with sun and see how it works…
I agree that earlier is better as long as you are within the callous temperature window. Once I grafted pears far too early and they all failed… even pears don’t like it when its too cold.
What kinds of grafts are you doing? You mention competition from the other shoots but I am removing all other shoots so there is no competition… I do whip, cleft or bark grafts only in spring. Are you doing some kind of bud graft? It could be that the type of graft may also matter for early success.
Scott do you remove the entire top of the tree, as in all scaffolds? I planned on leaving all other scaffolds and only removing all other wood on the single grafted scaffold.
I’m rethinking grafting this year. Gonna learn and prep for next year. Plus the one mislabel peach I planned to use is the least hardiest of all that I have. Maybe it’s strictly the variety and the rootstock is fine, but I don’t know what it is and don’t feel like taking a chance/possibly wasting time/energy.
Care to share again? I don’t see it.
Also, what about Bailey. More cold hardy than Lovell.
In general , grafting in 70s has higher take rates. But grafting peach with fresh cut scions in lower temperature has higher take rates too. In my experiences, it all depends on condition of the rootstock, the freshness of the scions, grafting techniques, and temperature. The rootstock needs to be waken up, buds are pushing at least. Dormant scion is grafted as soon as you can, the longer it stays in the refrigerator, the lesser chance of taking.
I have been experimenting winter grafting, so my grafting temperature is lower in general. The theory behind it is that in lower temperature, grafted joint has more time to heal. I grafting peach, plum, cherry, pear, apple… all in lower temperatures. At this time of the year in Chicagoland, I had half of my spring grafting done. I can’t tell the differences in take rate that grafted in lower temperature and higher temperature as long as cambium layer is aligned.
This is the peach graft I did last month. It got a lot of time to heal before it blooms and leaf out.
Yes I remove all the other shoots. Well sometimes on a really big tree I will leave a nurse shoot, but I haven’t seen a difference with or without. For persimmons you need to remove everything.
I don’t think it’s insurance. If it’s at most 60F and never sunny I don’t think peach grafts will work. Give it a try next year and let us know.
Ok. Thanks. Is that the same for summer chip budding or can you leave more growth on?
Your screen shot is in fact my point: there is sun on several days of that next period in your 3/26 screen shot, and even when Apple weather has a cloud there is often at least some sun on that day.
I challenge you to try grafting peaches in a stretch with no sun at all and temperatures at most 60F for the next ten days.
You are challenging me to try colder, so I am responding by challenging you to try no sun. I’ll try colder if you’ll try no sun, OK? 
We not infrequently have long spring periods with almost no sun at all. We have had a few of them this spring so far. Even if there is no sun for five days after grafting it could make success difficult since the wood quality will have degenerated in that period.
I had to regraft a red haven. I chose a scion with only vegetative buds. I left 4 buds.
In my sicion baggie I have basicly 5 types of scions…
Phew I think I got that right.
Cleft graft, cambium matched one side. Wrapped in parafilm, cleft sinched tight with a ziptie and tree coated the cut tip and grafted area.
Temperature outside is in the ideal range. Lets see what happens 
I prefer nectarine over peach. I have done nectarine on almond, peach, and plum. I have done w/t, cleft, bark, and side graft. I have use wood with bud and wood with no bud. The one with no bud will have to push out branch. I prefer grafting them during fall instead of spring. It give the scion more time to heal and they will push harder in spring. I have around 70% success grafting in fall. I use bark graft in early spring while the scion was still dormant. 40% success. I grafted when the bud was swelling using cleft and side graft. 3 push through the parafilm and 1 show sign of leaf, but not pushing out yet. Then, lately I use wood that have already leafed out. So I won’t know how they would do until 3 - 4 weeks. If grafting in spring is not doing it for you, then try grafting during fall.
Does the flower vs vegetative buds thing apply to apricots? I’ve only garfted one apricot and it took.
Thanks
In terms of temperatures, there was a thread where there were a lot of people testing how warm it needs to be to graft peaches.
Personally, I have better results in spring grafting waiting for temps to get pretty warm. I prefer 80 degree highs. But, I also am able to preserve the scionwood pretty well. I keep it right at freezing, then warm the wood up about once a month or so for a couple hours, to melt the ice in the bag, then put it back to 32F.
The wood tends to be in very good shape when I pull it out to graft. So the bud wood really isn’t old when it’s pulled out later in the spring.
My best results are fall budding. Large nurseries bud peaches, they don’t use spring grafts with dormant scionwood. They either use newly grown greenwood buds in spring grafting for southern nurseries, or fall budwood from current season growth. I’ve only had poor success one time fall budding, when a couple years ago I budded several plum rootstocks to peach and had mass failures. The rootstocks were too large and the bark wasn’t slipping. It was too big a rootstock for budding and too dry. Other than that I’ve had good results with fall budding. I’ve budded about peach 100 trees/year on average for over a decade.
It’s extremely rare for peaches to have large sections of shoots with just flowers. In fact singlet flower buds are much more rare on peach shoots than double or triplet flower/leaf buds. It is possible to just have flower buds, if one is only using a two bud stretch of peach shoot for a grafting, but the flower buds should still push, just like leaf buds.
I’ve done my share of chip budding peaches, but T-budding works better. Large commercial nurseries all use the T-bud methods vs. chip budding.
The context suggests the question is about peaches. If there are buds on the peach wood, it is one year old wood. Two year old peach wood won’t have any buds on it. Buds only form on one year wood for peaches.
The thing about grafting/budding is that there are dozens of ways to do it. And one person who has success with their way, naturally tend to think they have the secret sauce. But there are lots of ways to be successful grafting/budding.
If one is just starting out, I would suggest mimicking people who have lots of experience and lots of success. Of the posts above, I think Scott and Annie (IL847) would best fit the bill of well experienced and very successful. That will help your initial success, via mimicking their technique. Then you can branch out and try different techniques which may work best for your needs.
Also look at methods commercial fruit nurseries use, since they have a strong economic incentive to have successful graft/budding techniques. Of the dozen or more nurseries I’ve bought peach tree from in the past, I don’t think I’ve ever bought a peach from a nursery which spring grafts with dormant wood.
Not saying that grafting dormant wood in the spring is a bad idea, I’ve used that technique a lot. But the best results are from spring budding (for southern nurseries) and fall budding (for more northern nurseries).
what are some good sources for late summer/fall budding? also, does Lovell stock stool well?
Ok I have decided to act like an idiot again to challenge authorities on this site. I may regret later and delete my posts. 
We all agree that commercial nurseries do peach budding in either summer (June) or fall (September). It’s basically the most cost efficient way to propagate peaches.
But I believe you “mixed” up T-budding with chip budding. All the commercial nurseries in the world do chip budding on peach. Why? It’s much faster to do chip budding than T budding. A skilled worker can finish chip budding a peach in 5-10 seconds.
Ok i believe I’m just about convinced… I removed the flower buds from this scion and today most all buds broke.
Before with flower buds.
After removing flower buds. Sorry not the best picture but is the same peach graft.
Edit… added better picture.
I’m just happy to have another peach tree
There is no need to delete your posts.
It depends on the nursery. There are nurseries which chip bud, but T-budding is just as fast and widely used by large commercial nurseries.
Here’s another guy pretty fast at it. He says in the description of the video he can T-bud 350 trees per hour.
Here’s is a paper on commercial peach tree production based on interviews from large commercial fruit tree nurseries.
From the paper, specifically mentioning the T-bud method is used:
"Budding can begin in late May, depending on plant growth (the year) and continue
through June. Three people are involved. The scratcher moves ahead of the budder. The
scratcher pulls any weeds out of the way, thins the seedlings if desired, removes the lower
foliage and any soil from the lower stem by sliding a hand down the stem. A wrapper
follows the budder, tying the bud with a flat rubber band. In 1995, contract labor was paid
6-7 cents for each bud placed. The team of 3 shared this money. The team is frequently
a budder, wife and child.
The T-bud method is used. The bud is inserted 3-4 inches above the soil on the west
or south side of the seedling to help draw the bud out. The wood shield is removed from
the bud before inserting. A T-cut is made on the seedling, the bud inserted and tied with
a flat rubber band."
Here is a paper from Cornell on T-budding of fruit trees.
https://courses.cit.cornell.edu/hort494/mg/methods.alpha/TBudMeth.html
From the paper:
“[T-budding] Widely used for clonal propagation of temperate and tropical fruit trees and temperate ornamental shade trees. Tropical fruit trees such as citrus are T-budded onto seedling rootstocks largely to maintain the reproductive maturity of scion adult phase scion wood, and to take advantage of specific rootstock effects of various species rootstocks.”
Here is a video with Tom Spellman of Dave Wilson Nursery. Although he doesn’t mention peaches in this video he does mention they use T-budding for propagating cherries and a lot of their other nursery stock. Dave Wilson markets about 2 million peach trees annually (see 1:30 min)
