I have keifer, improved kiefer and orient pear trees here all grafted to callery.
They are in year 4 now and bloomed and set fruit this spring… that unfortunately a frost took off.
They are all growing very well.
I have added grafts of warren and karls favorite to kiefer… and grafts of potomac and bell to improved kiefer.. and all are growing well. The grafts added to them are in year 2 now.
I got growth of 7-8 ft year 1 from the grafts of kiefer, improved kiefer.
@TNHunter That’s great! If I were you, I’d take that fence off, or put cuts in it, and bend those branches over the stump, Cris crossing all of them to get the branches growing in a cup shape, for an open center dwarf or you could do a delayed open center with a little more clever tying all over the place.
But I think over bending them like that will make a strong union between the brancges and he stump, and cover it over and make a strong new base for the main trucks to stem from. I haven’t tested this yet, but I’m really itching to.
I think @clarkinks has had some issues with graft incompatibility.
Everything I’ve grafted to callery has taken (lots of euro pears) but some had this weird incompatibility that made the grafted branches grow curly. It was only on one tree each of Duchess and Sekel.
Clark also had a tree that looked like this and he seemed to think it would grow more normally with time.
I looked up pear yellows and I don’t think it’s anything like that. The tree is looking very good with lots of nice leaves and the graft looks good - just curved branches.
I wonder if I should learn to graft by practicing using callery pears as rootstock. I’m sure in my area no one would mind me messing with the ones that keep growing everywhere and if it works out people get edible fruit from the trees (well eventually depending on compatibility since I’ll be using scions from fairly random fruit trees somewhat related to pears that need to be trimmed before I do any actual cultivars.)
If I do I’ll report on how it goes. I think I can get scions from various crab apples, one apple tree that a neighbor needs to trim, various hawthorns, some serviceberry trees, and I guess cotoneasters and maybe photinias that need trimming. As fairly disposable scions. Oh and maybe an actual domesticated pear of some sort
It’s very easy to graft on pears. It’s a little late in the season, so you won’t get the best growth if you graft now, but you might as well try with real pear scionwood. You’ll also want to do it when it’s not too hot - wait till you have a few days where it’s not 90F out and you can put some tinfoil on them to keep the sun off.
There are piles of threads where people are making various grafts and tons with clark grafting on pears in all seasons.
But don’t underestimate your potential! You’ll probably get a lot of takes!
At least try to get good eating crabapples or pink flowering ones, or some pear cuttings to try, service berries are good too though, and where I live all the Tops plant service berries with a delicious sweet wine flavor in their parking lots! You could burgle a few cuttings I’m sure.
Top tips:
Use Parafilm! Wrap the whole scion and your wounds in the tree.
Clean but don’t sterilize with chemicals, you’ll kill more grafts than bacteria.
Watch SACADURA on YouTube! And Zemlyak if you want to learn the crazy techniques.
Learn bark grafts, cleft grafts, and Z-Grafts first. Later you can try whip and tongue, but it’s not even that useful when grafting to wild trees, because they’re usually too thick.
I’ve grafted lots of bird-planted callery over to euro pears. Bell, Maxine, magness, ayers, Blake’s pride, sunrise, moonglow, Shenandoah. Others I can’t think of. Bartlett is the only one I’ve had fail, and that was due to fireblight.
