Is the 160 temp necessary for the proper viscosity and to make the coating acceptably thin? I ask because wax liquifies at much lower temps than that in my experience.
Brian, I can’t tell you what or what not to do but I can derive from my own experiences and from people that showed me their life’s work before they passed away from their 40-years experience and my 18-years grafting experience.
There’s one thing I’ve learned and it’s that you can’t tell people what to do. They will always do what they believe is right even if they’re wrong.
Anyone here can shake your head “no” but my father told me from the very time I was a child without enough strength to get the basketball up to the hoop that he would tell me the truth all my life and that if I told the truth I would live a wonderful life. He was right.
He also said and reminded me often that if there was anything he learned the hard way to simply ask him and he would tell me the path of least resistance or the right way to do something. I’m talking both about the difficult obstacles we all will encounter during life as well as how to do/build something correctly.
You can change my recipe all you want- you asked, I wrote. I also told you I don’t know ‘physics’. I never questioned that old man that taught me. His reputation among peers was “there was no better grafter.”
Thank you for listening for a moment.
Dax
P.s. when you start allowing wax to drop to say 140 or 120 it goes on so it’s not transparent (it’s white or white/yellow from beeswax) and when it goes on heavy the scions will break thru the wax but no matter what you do, that thick coating of wax turns the wood black when you go to remove it mid-summer the same year or later that Fall or maybe the next year (whenever you get to it). You have to chip it off with your fingernail and you wouldn’t believe what it did to the wood. After that, two-years later, the wood is still discolored. Try selling that! Take care. : )
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Q: How does TreeKote do it?
A: They do it with asphalt.
Supposedly, the aerosol is the same messy formulation as their bottled product — only more so.
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That works for me!
I’m going to do it your way. I’m just curious about the science.
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Since my wife will, under no circumstances, let me put wax in our slow cooker…can I fill a jug with boiling water, drop in the wax, and let it cool to 160°? For small quantities, that is.
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Yes, and use a milk jug because it has a handle. Remove a circle large enough to dip.
Dax
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So the wax amounts are per gallon of water, is that correct?
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Different species have different requirements for protection. Bill Goff did a study a few years back that showed dipping pecan scionwood into wax was ineffective at best and somewhat damaging under some conditions. His conclusion was that pecan scionwood is best as long sticks of properly matured, collected, and stored wood without any surface coating. Obviously, the graft has to be protected when the scionwood is used to make a graft. This can be done with a plastic bag for inlay bark grafts, with grafting tape for whip and tongue or omega grafts, or with wax for cleft grafts.
I tend to lean towards the MacGyver solution moreso than the commercial. This spring I bought a $2 toilet wax ring, placed it in a small metal pan, set that on a metal rack just above a candle. I wrapped each graft union with 4 or 5 turns of parafilm then “painted” the wax on with an old paintbrush. Covered the parafilm, the entire scion to the end, and down onto the rootstock an inch or two. I was a bit concerned about the temperature but had read enough on here to think it wouldn’t be a problem. It apparently wasn’t, 30+ grafts with most successful. By fall there was still some wax present but the parafilm had split apart and much had fallen off.
I gauged temperature by whether the wax was solid or liquid, and liquid versus bubbling/boiling. Moving it away from the heat and not putting on scions when it was the latter. Worked for me 
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I’d like to say something I’ve been meaning to report for a long time and which sort of fits in here. Quite a few people here used to use toilet bowl wax rings (just pulling a finger full of wax off the ring) and I did it myself for a few years. But I have come to feel strongly that it is a mistake to use that- even though I know some of you do so. Perhaps there are different formulations of those wax rings which is why some of you have had good luck, but here is what I find:
If I smear that toilet bowl wax all over my scion wood to prevent it from drying out, it slowly destroys the bark on the scion. It makes it sort of dissolve- it just sort of turns the bark to mush and destroys it. If you put it really thin I’ve seen it work- mostly because it dries up and/or washes off before damaging the bark. But if put on realatively thick, it absolutely destroys the bark over the next 2 months or so. It acts like it has petroleum in it and I suspect it does, though I guess it also could just be that it totally prevents drying and evaporation to the point that it simply rots the bark. I’m not sure why it ruins it, but I’ve seen it over and over again and am sure that in many cases it DOES ruin the bark on the scion.
Anyway, its my experience that toilet bowl was ring wax should NOT be used, even though I know others seem to use it without issues. I can only say what I’ve seen and I’ve seen it a LOT. Just my experience.
BTW…I also tried that spray-on plastic coating stuff like “plasti-dip” and it does the same thing only faster and more dramatically, and with it you can SMELL the petroleum so I’m pretty sure that is why it doesn’t work- and it doesn’t.
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I haven’t seen that, but I only use it to touch up the wrap- so the johnny wax is not in direct contact with the bark. So you could be on to something there.
But as far as petroleum products go, I used to touch up the cut ends of scions with roofing tar. Saw no issues there.
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I tried the toilet bowl wax and had the same experience. It appears to damage the scion so I don’t use it now. If I remember correctly the old original rings were from beeswax but the newer ones I used was something different.
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I have used the tar products without any issues other than getting on my fingers and clothes.
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I’m a beekeeper so use beeswax with pine rosin for grafting wax.
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This explains some of my failed grafts from this year. Even though the cuts matched up great and the scions initially took, after a few months they died off. I smothered the graft union and most of the Scion with a thin layer of toilet bowl wax. The bark ended up turning black and the Scion plus a few inches of the rootstock died off.
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The last two years I’ve been using a mixture of 1 part waterproof exterior wood glue and two parts exterior latex paint as a DIY grafting paint/sealer. This is basically a version of Doc Farwell’s you can make yourself. I saw the recipe originally on the Eliza Apples blog to give credit where it’s due. I’ve had fantastic success with this on apples and pears, I just coat the whole scion and the union well. Buds push right through it no problem and it doesn’t hurt the bark at all. Has anyone else used something similar? Would this concoction work for species beyond Apple and pear?
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Sounds like a good plan.
I don’t do a lot of grafting and what I do seems to work for me, so I’m not looking for alternatives except that I find them interesting. But if I were I think I’d try your approach.
What kind of grafts do you typically do? I can imagine how your mixture might run down into a cleft. Or do you wrap the graft and then paint everything after that?
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I’ve used this with cleft, splice, whip and tongue, and bark/rind grafts. Bench graft unions I secure with parafilm, then the paint. Outside bark/rind grafts secured with electrical tape then painted over. Really only the outside grafts where I’m top working/frameworking something is there any real chance to get the paint into the graft at all, but I mostly do bark grafts and wrap super tightly so it hasn’t happened.
This past spring I was able to observe a large commercial nursery grafting apples, scions were dipped in a THICK coat of beeswax or similar prior to graft, union was taped with parafilm, then painted over with Doc Farwells or similar. That was on apples. I found it interesting to see how a professional operation was doing things.
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That’s good information. I’ve used it mixed with other wax and a thin coating a few times but never looked closely at failed grafts.
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Help? I did something foolish. I made my own grafting wax with 1:3 parts linseed oil:beeswax with some turpentine essential oil (for its anti-fungal properties) because I didn’t have anything better on hand and I wanted to do a lot of bark grafts. It ended up being pretty soft and I was worried it would get overly warm and melt off the tree/cause sun damage to the stumps I was grafting into so I painted over the grafting wax with interior paint. For the first few days everything looked good, but then temperatures plunged into the low 20s (I protected my grafts) and the wax cracked and started flaking off the stump ends on all the stumps that were closer to 45 than vertical.
Ahhhh! What should I do? I don’t want fungus to grow under the flaking paint/grafting wax.
I’m thinking that I should peal off the grafting wax covered paint where it is flaking off - luckily it’s not flaking around the graft unions, it’s just coming off the flat parts of the stumped branches. Should I then paint over that with interior paint or a different grafting wax? I don’t want to seal in fungus so I am at a loss…!
I don’t have pictures of the flaking problem, but I do have pictures of one of the grafts:
Thank you for any and all help!
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