Upgrade Your Fruit Tree

If you have fruit trees but never get the quality of fruit that you can buy from the market, maybe you should use grafting to upgrade your fruit trees. I had always thought that the reason why the apples and cherries from my tress were sour and small was because I did not fertilize them enough. I tried fertilizing, watering and tending to them obsessively, but I still didn’t get much improvement.

Then I found out from a friend about grafting. He lives in northern California and has a small backyard, but was able to bring us different varieties of high quality fruits. It turns out that he started grafting different fruit trees about 15 years ago and has collected many different types of fruit, many of them exotic. It helps that he is a volunteer for a plant preservation society in Stanford. He can readily get scions (branches for grafting) of all types.


For the rest of us, we can always find friends who have good fruit trees (or let me know if you are desperate and I will try to send you some). The nice thing about grafting is that you can get the exact fruit tree that you like. Just find the tree and the owner to get a scion from his/her tree in the winter or early spring and you are all set for the coming grafting season.

The North Carolina State University CES has a good discussion about grafting and the different grafting techniques to use for different situations. Go to their grafting page to read all about it.

The best way I have used so far is to graft to a branch using either the “splice graft” or the “whip and tongue graft”. I do my grafting in early spring when the day temperatures are around 50 to 60 degrees and night temperatures drop back to the 40s. This gives the graft time to develop. Grafting too early can cause the scion to freeze and die before joining up with the main branch. Doing it too late can cause the scion to compete with the growth of the rest of the tree and not get enough sap to develop properly.

I hate to report that the grafting this year is a bit of a disappointment. The picture above is my attempt this year to graft a scion on my shorter cherry tree where I was hoping to be able to reach the fruit more easily. My other cherry trees are much larger and do not have any low branches.

Anyway, I did the grafting in early April when it was still pretty cool, right about the time when the buds from the cherry tree started to come out. Then, in one week, the temperature soared to the eighties for a few days. All the leaves from the tree came out quickly as if it was summer, but my scions did not seem to be growing. Right now I’m still keeping an eye on the scions, but I’m not too optimistic at this point.

Although this is not the time for grafting, I want to post this now so you can be out looking for the fruit tree that you like and start planning for next year. I might post pictures from my apple tree with the different variety of apples on it, if all goes well.

By the way, don’t forget that you will need to have a fruit tree onto which to graft. So plant a fruit tree this summer if you don’t have one already. I was told that you can only graft onto similar kind of fruit trees; say, apple to apple, pear to pear, and orange to orange. However, I have done apple to pear successfully. So maybe one can graft onto trees with the same kind of core/seed pattern. Hopefully someone with more architectural background can enlighten us on this.

In any case, grafting is a lot of experimenting and only an annual event for me. But it’s kind of fun and the payoff from the experiments that work is long lasting. And the results have been delicious . . .