I’m wondering what people’s best, favorite, or most successful multi-graft trees are. I’ve pretty much run out of space to plant trees in ground at this point so I’m mostly grafting more varieties to established trees. Persimmons are a top fruit for me so I take a lot of pride in my Suruga/Saijo/Huk Kam tree – I spend a hard-to-justify amount of time just walking around my orchard looking at my trees and this is one I look at the most. I also have a plum with Purple Heart, Black Ice, and Lavina that is a good combo for me.
Does anyone else have a multi-graft they’re particularly fond of?
Not exactly matching the subject of this thread but I’m still in the planning phase but plan on doing a plum multi-graft onto a Shiro (as recommended by @alan ). I’m planning on growing it out for a year and then grafting onto it a Satsuma, Spring Satin and maybe one other variety. Onto my Hosui asian pear I want to add a 20th century and Korean Giant this spring.
Maybe in a year I will be able to follow up with the results.
I just started grafting last year so I don’t have any results yet, but I can comment on what I have done. I put two grafts of Superior and two grafts of Satsuma plums onto a Methley tree, and one of each of those grafts on a young Toka plum tree. I plan to add Shiro and Purple Heart on the Methley this spring.
I have Korean Giant and Sinseiko (sp?) on my Housi pear and unknown mislabeled pear trees, respectively. I have Seckle on a Bartlett.
Three of my apple trees are multi grafted and I plan to do the other two this spring. I think I have Hudson’s Golden Gem and Macoun on a Jonafree tree, Arkansas Black on Enterprise and Freedom and Liberty on Golden Delicious. I need to find homes for the three new scions I bought.
I too am out of room at this point so only one more persimmon and grafts from here on out.
Steve, you have a lot of trees. Are they in your yard or somewhere else?
My favorite is a wild seedling apple tree our property came with, maybe 30 yrs old and 20’ tall. I top worked it’s limbs over to 12 varieties over a period of 4 years, 2010-14. It was pretty ugly for awhile, but has grown back nicely, and started to produce some nice crops of an increasing variety.
I live in a townhouse in the city and have my orchard further out. So pretty much all of my trees except for a few figs are in the orchard. Many of my persimmons and figs are in pots that I move under the barn for the winter. I used to have some stone fruit in containers with the idea that I could avoid late spring frosts while they were in bloom, but keeping them watered became an issue so I gave up on that.
I liked my 25 feet Cleveland Flowering pear tree with a 16 varieties of Asian and European pears barked grafted on the lower ten feet of the tree for easy harvest. I also like to look at my 7 varieties of the American persimmon tree during harvest season in late September with all the different types of fruits on it. This Spring, I am going to chop down my 20 plus varieties apple tree for more space to plant more Honey Jar jujube trees because they are much sweeter and tastier than apple to me and with no spray required. I going with the low maintenance trees now on.
Here is the Lower 10 of the multi varieties of the pear tree.
This is a special multi grafted Pluots, Interspecific, and plum tree with Flavor King, Flavor Supreme, Flavor Queen, Flavor Grenade, Splash, Satsuma, Toka, Nadia, Sweet treat pluerry, and sweet Italian prune.
Because I have both trees I’m curious what made you graft the Sinseiko on the Hosui and Speckle on Bartlett. Why did you choose those specific varieties?
I have an apple I bought as a honeycrip, then worked over until it was equal parts gold rush, newtown pippin, reine des reinette, and gala. Gold Rush is amazingly productive. I get more gold rush each year now than all my other varieties combined. Liked the gold rush so much I’m working over a second tree to be 75% gold rush/ 25% golden delicious.
I bought a Fuji Apple in 2015 I think. grafted goldrush, prixie crunch, Williams pride, honey crisp, winter banana and harrow sweet on it in 2016. Grafts took but wouldn’t grow much until this year. Then a ground hog ate prixie crunch and gold rush off of it. I still have the rest. Late summer this year it started growing. Probably read my thoughts about pulling it out next year. It grew couple of feet. Still small but I like the varieties on it. I’ve decided not to graft anything at all on it. Hopefully I’ll get to eat few fruits next year.
I don’t have the best or most favorite multi grafted fruit trees. I’ve grafted for the past 5 years. I’ve been more interested in grafting as many varieties I want on my existing trees than being more strategic (and wise).
Almost all my fruit trees are multi grafted. Some have as few as 2-3 varieties. Others are 10, 20 and even 30. I wish I planned better how many grafts I should put on each tree, where each graft should be on a tree, etc.
I have many haphazard multi grafted trees with some having already lost their tags!!!
So what is a good strategy for planning out your grafts if you are planning to keep adding varieties each year to get the amount you have? What would you have done differently?
It’s almost impossible to manage a bunch of grafts on one tree. My strategy has been to have 3-5 scaffolds on each tree, and each scaffold be a different variety. Anymore becomes to much work to maintain. If I have a variety of fruit I like a lot, i want at least one scaffold if not more.
I have a khaki multi-graft.
I put on 9 or 12 varieties, I do not know anymore.
There the same tree there are some Asians like hachiaya, jiro, sharon, farmacista cellilia, honan red …
Hybrids like Nikita’s gift, Gora roman kosh, NB2
And 2 d.virginina (of which szukiss)
I would say that it is not a success. … very different strengths.
The most problematic variety is szukiss. Too vigorous it unbalances the tree.
I leave it for the moment to see if pollination can do this, but I have to severely cut this variety.
Sometimes rootstock are small but I have full grown trees I use to temporarily park some scion wood. Temporary in a couple of instances became permanent because I wanted backups of my fruit trees though my intention was never to make a multigraft tree. Multigraft trees almost always have a dominant variety that will choke out the others of the tree is ignored. Some types of trees don’t play well with others such as kieffer, Douglas, Duchess d’ angoulme etc… do not belong on the same tree as seckel, Clara frijs, etc… The foliage is very different between kieffer and seckel as an example so some wind damage occurs.
I had a large crabapple tree that produced dime size fruit. I cut it off at ground level and it grew about 10 shoots from The Roots. I then pruned those back to only four, and let them grow all year long, then grafted to all the branches on those four shoots the following spring. So now I have 25 different Apple varieties from that same Crabapple root system. I used cleft grafts, and each branch was roughly the same size, or slightly larger than my scions.
I have many multi trees but far too many are the result of “scion leftover” syndrome. But I do have one tri-plum that was pre-planned and, I’d say, fairly well done. Sort of. It was our first grafts (plus 2 apple), 2011. I had a chum grown from seed, nice sized with 3 nicely spaced 1-2" scaffolds. I’d ordered and received my scions. We read and reread the instruction sheet. Took saw, cut off two scaffolds and bark grafted 2 scion pieces on each - LaCrescent on one, Underwood on the other. I’d planned to leave the third original to see what it would fruit but it looked odd being left (and that grafting bug spreads fast) so we cut it off, snipped a scion from next-door Gracious and bark grafted it on. Using budding rubbers and homemade wax that part was a little messy but they took, survived, and grew vigorously. Wow!!! Thankfully, the three are more or less equally vigorous.
Success? Well, not totally. Large plums on small chum wasn’t the best idea. LaCrescent and Underwood have overgrown the chum stock by a lot, and since I couldn’t bring myself to cut off that 2nd scion until much later, way too much later, the graft area is a real clunky mess. Gracious, with just one bark graft on a smaller sized branch to begin with, is much better. But if you stand back a ways it looks pretty good. Fruit? You want fruit, too? Oh well. I’ve gotten a few random plums. But that’s a pollination and climate problem and true of all my plums. I like the tree anyway. It reminds me that one can have a nicely shaped, organized, manageable multi-tree simply by using some clear thought and self control. I’m sure I could do another one if I tried.
Meantime, watching my other multi’s grow, some with 4-6 varieties, I’m thinking that for me 3 varieties max is best and I like to think I’ll limit myself to that in the future. But I like them all and wandering whenever possible around my orchards, I consider gazing for many multiple long minutes at first one then another tree essential orchard, and orchardress, management! Sue
LOL! Yes I think I have my orchard memorized in my head. Now when I’m looking at them, I’m thinking fo how I’m going to prune them. Luckily I don’t have much room and only have so many trees. So I have been staring at them a lot.
What I did is graft low on horizontal branches. Now 2nd stage is to cut scaffold down to new graft. I will be losing a lot of fruit, but long term it will yield many varieties of my liking. Hence me staring to figure out best cuts. So it looks like my trees are in for a severe prune to accommodate last spring’s grafts. Plus it will be renewal pruning. Most of my trees will be 6th and 7th leaf. A couple younger ones. We will see how well this works. Peaches tend to lose production with time, so the dormant pruning will stimulate vigor and hopefully direct it to the new grafts. On plum trees is more about replacing exiting scaffolds with new cultivars. With some spur production on plums branches are active longer. Still it will give vigor for new spurs to form.
