Fruit Tree Grafting 2013 - Apple scion to a Pear tree

In my earlier Fruit Tree Grafting 2009 round 1 post, I talked about cross grafting between apple and pear trees.  Although the weather was great in 2009 and all the normal grafts were sucessful, none of the cross grafts took.
This year I tried grafting a Golden Delicious scion to my pear tree.  I did that in the March time frame while everything is still quite dormant.  This is how the graft looks like on 4/27 when the weather started to turn warm and the pear tree blossoms started to develop.

By 5/5, the Golden Delicious scion started to spout along with the rest of the pear tree.

And then, by early July, the leaves are out and the cross grafting of an apple scion to the pear tree was finally sucessful!!!

This graft was done with a single slant splice tied with the normal green grafting tape. I actually removed the grafting tape a couple of weeks ago to inspect the joint and all looked well.  I put the tape back on in case the growth is still not strong enough.  I will remove the tape by late summer or early fall.

Simple Seed Holder

It’s autumn, and you have harvested all the fruits and vegetables.  If you are into starting you own plants in the spring, you will want to keep some of the seeds from the fall harvest.

I have started to do some of that and was looking for a way to store the seeds.  I didn’t want to put the seeds in a plastic sandwich bag since some of the seeds were still kind of fresh and moist. I wanted to package them so that they could dry up and keep till next spring. I needed to label the packages so I could tell what was what. I have different types of peppers, tomatoes and melons.  It would be good to differentiate between the hot peppers that I grow less of to the different colored bell peppers.

Overall Grafting 2009 was a Success

It’s been a while since I did all those grafts in spring of 2009.  It is now Fall of 2010.  The scions that took had a full two seasons to grow.  Most of the scions took except for the experimental grafts.

The ones that failed were the cross genus grafts between the apples and pears.  Although I had one success before grafting an apple scion to a pear tree, I was not able to repeat that.  Also, except for the branch shown above, all the cherry grafts did not take.  While not having more cherry grafts take is a disappointment, it was not a big surprise.   Most of the branches I got from my friend Dave were mature branches.  Most of them had

One Simple Way to Conserve Water

Generally, it is advicable to run the tap a little bit before drinking the water off a tap, especially if the tap had not been used overnight.  Also, one might just want to run the water till it is cold for drinking or warm for washing hands.  Lots of water can be wasted.  Why not collect the water to use for other purposes in the house.  The water can be used for washing dishes or watering plants.

One easy way to do it is to wash and save a gallon milk or cider jug.  Keep the jug near a faucet so that water can be collected instead of letting it go down the drain.  In our house we collect about a gallon of water every few days.  This is just about enough to water the potted plants inside the house.

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.

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.

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.