I have read that most stone fruit can be grafted onto other stone fruit rootstock.
My neighbor has an older Bing cherry that he would like to convert to either plum or curl resistant peach.
Anyone have experience on the possibility or best methods?
Dennis
Kent, wa
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Going to need to get some adara/puente scions to act as compatible intergraft btween cherry snd the dpecies you listed
@DennisD just last month, i grafted japanese and euro plums to our (suspected) bing. The Japanese took faster than the euros which appear to be waking up about 2 weeks later. Satsuma, santa Rosa, northern sunset, french improved, mirabelle, green gage, italian prune, president and a mystery plum. The Italian prune was actually grafted last year end of August so it’s just a bit ahead if the euro pack. Greengage,.mirabelle, and president buds are just now beginning to swell so not sure if they’ll really take. My goal is just for these to produce enough growth to harvest scions for grafting to a plum rootstock next year.
I used wedge graft for the first 3 or 4 of them then whip and tongue for the rest. This was the first time I ever tried whipntongue.
Hi Tubig,
Keep me posted on what works for you! I will also update you on my results once I see what is working!
I decided this year to use interstims of Adara and cherry scions to topwork all three of my cherry trees. I prepared all my scions in advance and dark calloused them in a moist warm area prior to grafting them onto the cherry trees.
For my Adara scions, I prebuded them with various plum chip buds.
For my cherry scions, I prebuded them with Adara chip buds.
I too used some wedge grafts but also cleft for top working and for some smaller branches that I left for nurse limbs, I used the double tongue graft.
If I get the cherry scions to grow, I hope to force the Adara buds to grow, then prune off and cherry growth and use the new Adara wood to accept other plum, pluot, or pluerry scions.
Earlier in Feb thru March I grafted numerous plum varieties to existing plum trees. Since it was very early, I protected each graft with a dark plastic and solar tent to protect from the cold wet weather, and insulate to help speed callousing while I awaited the wakening from dormancy. Yesterday I surveyed my plum grafts and was very pleased batting around 90% success! Probably the most successful graft I have used this year is the whip and tongue and the double tongue.
@DennisD do you have photos of the “most-awake” plum graft from Feb or March? I’m wondering if mine are slow or not, given i don’t have a graft i can compare it with on a plum grafted grafted to plum at the same time. I’m at zone 8a.
My original plan was actually simultaneously chip bud the plum to adara scion then cleft adara to cherry but couldn’t acquire adara.
I was able to uncover a good portion of my scions and chip buds today. Will finish tomorrow as time allows.
Here are several examples of the double tongue graft. Notice how large the rootstock can be with this technique; my favorite graft
Hi Tubig
Here are several other pics. The first two are double tongue bark grafts, the other is a whip & tongue graft
Here are some of mine with the following info to show how “old” the graft is: [date photo taken], [shortened variety name], [date grafted].
French= french improved
Nsunset=northern sunset
Pres=president plum
It seems like the japanese woke up first but once the weather got warm, the euros are catching up fast.
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Hi Tubig,
Good pictures, are you certain your tree is sweet cherry? I noticed the word suspected. When I tried to graft other stone fruit last year to my Bing cherry, the scions would look ok for a week or so, but eventually die, failed to actually grow. I had 100% failure. So I am still watching most of mine closely to see if they can get beyond the initial bud energy to a point where they actually grow.
I think another 2 weeks may make a difference. Send me a pic of your tree!
Dennis
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I said “suspected bing” only because I didn’t plant the tree myself. I asked my mom more details just today and according to her, it was her officemate’s gift who said it was a bing cherry and it used to have a label “Bing”. The fruit also tasted and looked a lot like bing cherries sold in stores so it’s probably bing indeed. Here are a couple of shots. It was totally neglected and I’m trying to reduce the size back to a more harvester-friendly height. The grafts i made are actually on top of the roof.
If you zoom in, some of the grafts are actually visible just to the left of the the trunk on the left side where the lowest branch is.
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Here’s an early Italian graft from August 29, 2020. Now flowering. I also grafted a non-early italian and an alleged early golden plum last year late July on the low branches but they either didn’t take or took but got hit last month by falling branches as i was pruning off the top of the tree.
Well it sure looks like a Bing, and last years graft seems to be growing! So keep me posted as the others grow and I will share my pics thru the summer of ones that work and ones that fail
Thanks
Dennis
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Looks like I may be see the first 2 casualties here… Both of my elephant hearts look like they dried up almost overnight…the other varieties still look ok. Not sure if it’s due to the several days of heat, variety, or bad graft…or all of the above. I covered these two up with aluminum foil now to see if it makes any difference.
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The dry hot month has taken a toll, I went around and recovered a major portion of my recent grafts that were dessicating to conserve moisture and also watered each tree the last 3 days to attempt to save some of mine. It’s too early to tell if that will actually work. I am thinking that I had much better success with the sour cherry grafts and the plum grafts I did in Feb- Mar when the heat was no a factor and we had more moisture. The majority of those
are still looking great
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So far, dead are: 1/1 santa Rosa and 2/2 elephant hearts, 1/3 president plum. If i recall correctly tho, those were in a bit of difficult positions to graft, thus the cuts weren’t very good. The rest are either showing atleast some life to about 0.5cm branch growth at the most. The early Italian from last year has a tiny 4mm fruitlet now.
It seems like the euros are generally doing better than the japanese… Only the 2 satsumas are surviving but they don’t look that good.
Hi Tubig,
The hot spell we had sure took a toll on my later grafting efforts. In the April 17 pic I posted the One labeled K for Kuban Comet, has completely failed, even though I cover it with a moist baggie during several weeks of the heat. Only a few of my cherry top working grafts are showing life, but I think the majority will fail. I think there were several contributors to my failures: grafting too late, inexperience with the techniques, and perhaps too much time between the scion preparation and using them. Since there were some successes, it makes diagnosis a challenge to determine best strategy for next year. Even most of my whip &tongue grafts failed on cherry; whereas, my earlier similar grafts of sour cherry on sweet worked very well. So I conclude that next spring I will do all my cherry grafts very early in mid Feb to mid March. In about 2 weeks I should be able to give you a final count on my cherry top working.
Dennis
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Hi Tubig,
Well I just hit a new low in grafting percent with this top working effort. So few are taking that it’s really a challenge for me to discern what exactly is causing so many to fail. Even the several that seem to have buds growing are not really growing vigorously in comparison to all other varieties where I did really well! So what to do now? The only bright side is that I did excite some new latent buds of the cherry to sprout below where I cut limbs off. One thing that intrigued me is your comment a few weeks ago that your Early Italian plum graft onto cherry was working and actually growing. I have two types of Italian plum. One is quite larger than the other and both are clear stone. I took picture of the foliage of each tonight to ask you to compare them to the Italian plum that has been shown to be compatible with your sweet cherry. I am thinking that this summer i will use summer budding to chip bud several experimental grafts onto some of my year old cherry limbs to see if I have compatibility. Please compare my pics to your tree and tell me if either has similar foliage. Later as fruit ripens I will send you pics of each as well to compare. The one with my neighbors truck tire is the larger variety. It’s leaves are slightly larger also than in the top pic which is my smaller Italian plum. The larger plum has less serrated leaf structure.
Thanks
Dennis
Kent, wa
Hi Tubig,
Have you been able to compare my pics with your Early Italian’s?
Dennis
@DennisD hi, sorry i haven’t been able to compare coz i don’t think the leaves are fully grown at this point. I will take a shot tho as soon as we get better weather and leaves look more mature. I wanna minimize stepping on the roof where the grafts are so I’d rather wait when i can actually provide you with more reliable shots.
The fruitlet aborted btw. It looked like it cracked open and hung on for a few days before falling off.
I also compared the grafts of most of the same varieties to my satsuma plum rootstock and can see a huge difference in vigor. I was surprised tho that the euro plums were also stronger on the satsuma.
Btw, if i understood correctly, you used adara as interstock on the bing cherry correct? Did the adara interstock take in spite of the plums failing?
Hi Tubig,
I checked this am to answer your question. I am generally disappointed in the entire grafting effort. Out of over 30 grafts I made to attempt to top work these 3 cherry trees, only two scions are showing any life at all and these two are very anemic. One (bottom pic) is a cherry scion with Adara chip buds. Only one Adara bud on this scion seems to be growing. The other (top pic) was an Adara scion with Toka plum chip buds. But only a very small green tip can be seen, so it’s not really promising. I don’t have a good explanation for such poor results other than the heat spell.
Dennis
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