Fruit Tree Grafting 2009 Round 1

After the total grafting failure in 2008, it is time to try again.  This is very early in Spring.  But the temperature had been in the 50s and 60s already.  The daffodils came up and is blooming.  I can see that some of the fruit tree flower buds are showing signs of opening up.  Temperature next week will be around 40 to 50 degrees with night temperature in the 30s.  Best time to graft is when the day time temperature is in the 50s and night temperature are in the 30s.  This will give the scions a chance to develop in the day time while the process slows down at night to give more time for the scion to be taken.

This year I have a few goals I wanted to achieve:

Preserve the Fuji apple tree and whatever else I can save.

Move the Yali oriental pear to a smaller tree to see if I can keep the Yali more “reachable”

Continue the quest to introduce some very good cherry stock to my existing well established wild cherry trees in the backyard.

My Fuji apple tree had been grafted with many different kinds of apples over the past years.  This included the Honey Crisp variety before Honey Crisp became popular here in Rochester, NY.  Three years ago, I had to move the tree to a shady area at a low spot in the backyard.  The apple tree had not grown very well and the fruits were very small last year.  As a matter of fact, I can see the lower trunk of the apple tree start to have some insect hole and some rotting.  I want to preserve the tree by grafting its branches to other places. 

Since I only planted one apple tree with the intention of grafting other varieties on it, I do not have a backup tree.  Luckily, my neighbor has a golden delicious tree and had agree to have me upgrade his tree.  I will use his tree to preserve branches from my dying tree.

Also, I am going to trying something that might not work but I will do it any way.  That is, I plan on grafting apple branches on my oriental pear trees and just try grafting my Yali oriental pears on my neighbor’s apple tree.

In round 1, I grafted an apple scion each to my Yali and yellow oriental pear trees.  I can only find rather thin branchs to cut from the apple tree, but at leat these branches appeared to be healthy.

I also grafted Yali branches to the yellow oriental pear tree.  I picked the ticker branches since I prunned the water spouts off the ever growing Yali tree and had a lot of scions to pick from.

As the scions develop, I will post updates of the first round of grafting.  I am expecting to get the chery tree scions from my friend who’s sister bought a house that was part of an orchid that had some of the best cherries in the area.  I will also be trying to do some grafting on my neighbor’s apple tree.  I will attempt to graft some of my Yali pear scaions to his apple tree as well.  Stay tuned!!!