After you’ve got your scions safely stashed away grab your nippers and go out in search of water sprouts that need to be removed. When you’ve got a few take them to a comfortable chair, grab your tool kit, lean back with your coffee, and start practicing. Just take them apart and put them back together again. You’ll get some experience without wasting good wood, and it’s not a bad way to spend an hour or so.
I’ll add that field grafting has enough of it’s own challenges to warrant taking your new skills outside and use them on springy branches, without a table, with all your tools in your pockets (or carpenter apron, that’s what I use). Knife + fingers = be careful. Around here, alders are the guinea pigs I use.
Excellent advice.
Well, splicing doesn’t require much skill or a knife- my customers generally get great results the first season they try it. Plus it is quicker and seems to work as well as any other method. Here’s the tool I use although when I first started doing it I just used a typical Felco pruner and it worked well enough. I’ve never shed a drop of blood while grafting (pruning is another story).
Last year was my first year grafting and had good luck with it. Practiced quite a few techniques but decided to stick with splice and cleft.