Fruit Tree Grafting 2009 Round 2

My friend Dave got me some fresh cherry branches from his sister’s cherry trees a couple of weeks ago.  When I got the branches, the temperature started to climb into the 50s and even 60s.  I was getting worried and wanted to get the branches grafted as soon as I can.  I did not want to repeat what happened last year where the leaves all came out suddenly and ruin my grafting opportunity.  We had a rainy Saturday but Sunday turned out to be great so I went out and did as many grafts as I can.


I got a lot of cherry branches.  Not all of them are new growths as I would have wanted but the variety of branches is giving me a opportunity to see how different types of scions develop.  Dave’s sister’s cherry trees are mature orchard trees with very well established branches and lots of blossoms.





I had a sucessful graft three years ago and even enjoyed a few nice cherries from an old wild cherry tree.  That year, I grafted too early and only one graft turned out sucessful.  Another lesson I learned is not to graft on the tip of a long branch.  My graft was fine but the branch that the scion was on developed some kind of fungus and appears to be dying.  Based on these experiences, I am developing a new strategy for the 2009 cherry grafting.

 For this year, I grafted on different branches.  They range from grafting to shoots that came out of a main trunk of an established tree and the water sprouts that came out of a cut down younger tree (pictured on top of this post).

The above picture is a graft that I made to the growth that came off a larger tree trunk.  These wild cherry trees in my backyard are very tall and it was hard to be able to find other low branches to graft to.  To match the size of the side branch to the size of the scion, I was not able to graft the scion as close to the tree trunk as I want.  I am hoping that this close enough so that the graft will develop into a strong branch on the side of this big tree.  I pick this rather thinner scion since it had a lot of leave buds and appears to be a strong new growth.

There were a couple of other type of scions that I used for experimentation.  Some of the thicker branches appears to be more mature and have a lot of blossoms on them.  I chose some of those that appears to have smaller buds mixed in with the larger flower buds on them that I am guessing that they are leave buds.  I am hoping that the leaf buds will grow after the flowers bloomed.  I even kept some of the flower buds to see if they will develop into fruits.  Yes, you are not suppose to keep the fruits in the first year when the scions first took.  Well, I have enough grafts so what the heck.  I will see how it turns out.  Below is an illustration of the graft of scions with flower buds.

Another experiment is with scions where there are no obvious leave buds but only flower buds that I removed.  Well, I did a couple of these just to see what will happen.  Below is a picture of one of such grafts.

BTW, on this day I made a total of 22 grafts.  9 of them were cherries distributed to three trees and with various scions as described above (thanks Dave for the branches).  I also grafted Fuji apple and Yali (my favorite oriental pear) branches to a neighbor’s apple tree and a friend’s oriental pear trees.  My neighbor has a golden delicious apple that he thought did not produce very good apples.  I grafted 5 Fuji apple scions and a couple of Yali scions to “upgrade” his apple tree.  I will have to see if the Yali scions will develop on an apple tree.

On my friend’s oriental brown pear tree and yellow pear tree, I made 3 Yali grafts on each tree.  This will add another oriental pear variety to their existing trees.  Since I had a lot of very strong new water spouts from my Yali tree that I pruned to get ready for 2009, I had a lot of scions to experiment with.  With the larger diameter grafts (up to 1/2 inch), I used the whip and tongue graft.  This gives a very strong graft for the larger branches.  See below for a close up picture before I wrapped up the graft with green grafting tape.

Overall, I think I have spread out my chance of success and “planted” a lot of experimental grafts to gain learn more about the different grafting condition.  I still have a few scions left in case we got severely bad weathers such as ice storm or bad freeze that could ruin my grafts.  Hope I do not have to go to Round 3 of 2009 grafting.