Last year I did a number of honeycrisp grafts onto a Goldrush.
Most of them took and I decided to take some scion wood from
some of those grafts, in order to do more of the tree. The grafts
from where I took the scion wood have resprouted and have leafed
out, but the other grafts are still dormant. They’re alive, but are just
sitting there. Has anyone ever experienced this?
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Same here. HC is unpredictable. Like a big bear, it does what it wants to. It is my most unpredictable apple. Sorry I can’t help. Bill
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Honeycrisp took forever to break dormancy in my warmer climate. A full one month after all other apple varieties woke up. So yes, Bill’s description seems accurate.
Did you store the current year scions in the refrigerator?
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What Vin said. I’m not sure it has even leafed out here, yet for me. Have to go up the hill to see.
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that’s normal, it happens, for example pink lady needs only 400 hours of cold and going out of dormancy before an apple tree you need 1000 hours
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My Honeycrisp are way behind most of my other apples when it comes to breaking bud this spring. Most still look pretty dormant.
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Yes, but that has nothing to do with what’s happening. Why are the
grafts, from which I took scions, putting out shoots and growing from the area
of the cut, while the rest of the graft is dormant? How do you explain that??
Maybe the scion got fewer/more chill hours. How about microclimates between the two trees?
It could be a number of things. You may have fertilized in the early fall and put on some growth that you collected the scions from. They might have immature buds that need to sit for a bit because they’re starving.
Ray, on every single one of my trees that I pruned back new wood to send people scions from, those branches that were cut back came to life first, and sent out the most new growth. I didn’t cut anything from my young honeycrisp. It was the very last tree of all my trees to start waking up. Even the persimmons leafed out first. STILL only about ¼ of the branches on that honeycrisp have partially leafed out. I can see that the rest are alive and very slowly fattening their leaf buds. I’ve been thinking about just cutting the sleepy ones back a bit to see if that will nudge them out of dormancy.
From an earlier conversation on here, HC appears to normally be a late one to waken. I also think mine was a night owl, so to speak, not going fully dormant until January, because of our very warm December.
In some ways, it’s acting just like my Double Red Delicious did, but on the opposite end of the spectrum. The DRD started out of dormancy with the warm December weather, and continued to leaf out and bloom bit by bit from the end of the year through March. They may both be reacting to what they consider lack of appropriate chill during their dormancy. It’s just that one went dormant early, and the other, late.
Mine aren’t grafts, but it’s the same variety tree, and we’re so close to one another that our weather patterns were identical with only minor differences in temperature.
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Maybe I’m not making myself clear enough. I’m talking about the behavior of a single graft on one tree that has not been fertilized. The part of the graft that was cut for scion wood for this year’s graft, has sprouted and grown at least a foot, while the rest of the graft is still dormant.
I understand what you are saying, and agree, that is bizarre.