Last year I was about to cut down some very sour & astringent myrobalan plums in front of my house when I got the bright idea that it may be possible to graft them over to something useful. After studying up on grafting methods, I visited the CRFG scion exchange and picked up a few twigs of various plum cultivars.
By the end of the season some of the pencil sized scions had grown into 12 foot tall trees. This February I removed the top 4 feet to manage the height. I was simply amazed at the growth rate. And addicted to this new hobby.
Its always so much fun seeing before and after pics. Hey…I’m just curious. How come you didn’t choose to do any cleft/bark grafts. I’m certainly not saying you should have (the method you choose obviously worked really well) but I was just curious. I did several last year and many of them took and grew a lot, but over the winter a lot of them ended up failing. Perhaps thats why you didn’t try them?
Great job on those grafts, though.
Wow, GREAT job, Dan! I knew immediately looking at your photos you were in California.
And, glad to see you’ve got a Mirabelle plum going there. We will look forward to an update on all your plums. Well done.
All of the grafts on the two trees in the foreground were cleft grafts.
I tried some bark grafts and wedge grafts directly on the stumps of some other trees but had worse results with those methods. In my limited experience, the bark grafts directly on the top of the stump are relatively weak and prone to breaking in high wind. If I had to do it again I would stake those bark grafts for a couple years.
My best results are cleft grafts to trunk suckers (water sprouts). Close to 100% takes on those and quite strong.
Thanks for your response dan. I was asking about stump/bark grafts (though i used the word cleft) and the reason you gave is EXACTLY what I was wondering about. The majority of my stump-top grafts that took did exactly what you just described- broke loose over the winter, probably from high wind. I, too, have decided if I do more this year I am going to stake them much better. Thanks for your opinion. Great job.
I always use water sprouts for my grafts nowadays- but then I almost always am adding varieties and not changing trees over entirely. If you use splice grafts it takes a third the time of a cleft and seems to work as well if you wrap it firmly with either vinyl or rubber electric tape. The vinyl needs to be unwrapped the following winter-spring, but with plums it doesn’t seem to pull off any bark in the process so you don’t have to make a razor cut to free the scion.
You got very nice results, in any case, and if you only do a few grafts a year the most efficient use of time is not a prerequisite. Also there is often no convenient water sprout where you want to place a graft.
This year I topworked a wild plum in my backyard with some more of Luther Burbank’s cultivars.
Apex plumcoct, Burbank plum and Heart plum on this rootstock.
