Fruit Tree Grafting: Spring Field Notes

double working, nadia on an interstem. nadia is a unique sweet cherry hybrid, and seems somewhat hardy to zone 3, and it can grow on its own roots. so grafts like this are for experimental softwood propagation, I did a whole set this spring about three weeks ago and they're just starting to leaf out,

a sweet mountain ash grafted onto saskatoon. some mountain ash selection are edible, better tasting. and it seems to grow reasonably well on saskatoon, this graft is in its 3rd growing season

z graft everything. I find that most field grafts, unless the scion size and body position is just right for whip and tongue, the z graft is now my goto. when I bench graft, sure whip and tongue. my recent run of sixty different apple scions onto seedlings, unless you stand over them, z graft all the way. we'll see what the take it like next month.

trellised apples, a project to work over this old stool bed into something cool, a gene bank of cultivars, a store to grow just scions in a pollard style espalier. I have saved one scion of each cultivar I collected and grafted this spring, and alphabetically will graft them today. 55 apples A-Z all zone 3 hardy.

grafting sweet cherries, prunus avium onto pin cherry, prunus pensylvanica .. a few russian types, so far survived -40 a couple of winters.

our root cellar is holding steady at -1C (30F) .. I keep an air intake on a timer to cycle cold air nightly just before sunrise, otherwise it would be a few degrees warmer. this is where we store all of our trees and scion wood to keep it fully dormant for a couple more weeks.

top working russian pears onto saskatoon, z-grafts continue to be my goto for this. and I'm fluent in all the grafts availble ;) this really is the best option I know of. if the diameters match I switch to whip and tongue. sometimes I'll throw in a bark graft or a modified cleft.

mustang on chokecherry with an interstem. flowering intensely, pretty sure this can pollinate other plums.

double working pears, here is paul pear on saskatoon as an interstem, with favoritka red on top. it's experimental, but I've noticed some pears take off and grow more vigorously on saskatoon, and some of these could be interstems.

apples grafted to saskatoon.

bolshaya pear full of flowers. It's grafted onto saskatoon, which can be precocious and it's dwarfing. I'm out grafting more pears this week.

bench grafted plums, done kinda late in the season but maybe the timing will work. second photo is apricots on sandcherry, just finished them so i'm done bench grafting for the year. now just field grafting.. about 30 ea new plum, pear and apple varieties to graft out, just need it to stop raining for the weekend.

sweet mountain ash grafted to saskatoon. I took cuttings in the fall and grafted some actual mountain ash seedlings this week, but it seems quite compatible with amelanchier alnifolia, you can see the union looks solid and it's healthy.

prunus americana grafts one year old flowering. excellent for pollinating other plums, easy to graft onto chokecherry. i'm getting about 90% take and winter survival on these, the later photos are grafts from 2022 with very heathy union and in full flower.

grafting workshop on the weekend, thanks to everyone who came out. we had a dozen people at a nice outdoor location @assiniboinefoodforest and all the workshop fees were a donation. everyone got to bring home a grafted apple tree and extra scion wood, was fun to do

couple of russian pears grafted in 2022 about to flower. excited to try them. one of the photos is the graft union on saskatoon, holding up well.

planting apple and pear bench grafts today. around 120 in the first bed, a couple more to go. plums and apricots are still in the greenhouse callousing.

grafting some lee red chokecherry, it's a variety with purple leaves. also garrington, with larger fruit, and even a yellow fruiting selection.

z grafts I find are a good option when the scion is smaller, it benefits from the offset to the side to get cambium contact and heals over faster than a cleft graft. it looks a bit like a whip and tongue if you cut the tongue very close to the tip, it's cut with the scion flipped around so feels very different to do. #grafting

a hybrid plum with some simonii in the parentage (25%) growing well directly on chokecherry coming into year 3. will be grafting more of this one out as a potential interstem, toka thrives on chokecherry (50% Prunus simonii) but it's basically too vigorous. search for the perfect chokecherry compatibility continues, eventually I'll write this trial up as a paper and just post it on my blog

z grafts are my preferred option for top working, when the stock is larger than the scion. especially for prunus, it's stronger and heals faster compared to modified cleft.

hey made the local paper today, it's an article about an upcoming grafting workshop that we do at the @assiniboinefoodforest and it's just a $40 donation and you get to graft a tree and take it home. I set aside some of our largest rootstocks for it, 15 spots still some left for local folks in the Brandon MB area

interstem, bridging brookred plum onto chokecherry with a short section of toka

grafting season starts, all of our apples and pears are bench grafted in march. a couple of weeks inside to callous then back to the root cellar until around the start of may. we're a small nursery and I do all the grafting so the limits are mostly what rootstock we grew and time, but maybe five hundred between apple, pear and plum this spring. I just do them in the evenings so on track for about fifty each day, it's fun and I look forward to it every year. field grafting is done later, that's when the real fun starts around end of april through mid may and I have about as many planned for working over old crabapple, pear and wild rootstocks to grow out new varieties and continuing compatibility trials

my attempt to graft haskap seems to be working, I removed the foil shading the other grafts since they don’t seem to be needed, it was just a precaution. this bush is in partial shade. and it experiences -3C for eight hours last night, haskaps shrug off the cold. excited to try and grow out a couple of these maxine thompson varieties, rooting hardwood was tricky with low success. softwood is easy.

triple worked graft. choke cherry rootstock -> toka interstem -> mustang cherry flowering, second interstem -> apricots just grafted. mustang and last photo is sapalta flowering, unlike other plums these cherry plum hybrids like to flower just one year after grafting.

apple grafts onto saskatoon two years old. I did these as an experiment with left over scion wood in july. surprisingly they’re growing ok, but they’re low and vulnerable to deer and rabbits so i’ve lost some. amelanchier alnifolia, or seevice berry, known as saskatoon grows wild here and has some reputation as a pear rootstock, and now I’m discovering a dwarfing apple rootstock. if it survives for 3 or 5 years and fruits that would be a success for me, at minimum it’s a way to grow out scion wood. #grafting

an attractive result, red leafed siberian crabapple on saskatoon. one year old graft leafing out. It’s not well known that amelanchier alnifolia has some graft compatibility with apples, I’m trialing it as wild dwarfing apple rootstock. Resistant to apple diseases, grow well in sand, cold hardy to zone 2, dwarfing. precocious? long lived? maybe just for some selection that could serve as an interstem? hey it’s a rootstock that grows delicious purple berries.. #grafting #redfleshedapple

attempting to graft swedish Leningradskaja sweet cherry onto pin cherry. It’s zone 4 hardy, maybe even 3/4. I have some slightly sprouted scions so wrapping in foil to keep the sun off. #grafting

plum grafting in my trial block of chokecherry. a short walk through some of the grafts with interstems that are waking up, with many positive results. this week I’m adding more cultivars, and trying some manchurian apricots, which will be using 2 interstems. choke cherry -> toka -> mustang -> apricot.

bark grafts on an old pear tree, top worked two years ago from ussurian pear. It’s mostly a tree to grow out scion wood. I don’t usually make cuts so large but they’ll eventually heal over.

ussurian pear grafted on saskatoon in 2022 flowering in it’s third year.

keeping an eye on things leafing out. it’s the height of grafting season right now when the leaves are just starting.

nice result painting grafts with wax, I made a hot grafting wax from an old recipe with beeswax and pine rosin, paraffin. something enjoyable about using wax. #grafting

field grafting pears onto saskatoon #grafting. going back to paint the stumps before it rains, the parafilm is ok but not sealed enough

unwrapping graft unions from last year. If you use budding tape it can stretch and stay on the first winter

z graft, an alternative to modified cleft when your stock is larger than scions. #grafting

been preferring z graft as a variation of the modified cleft on larger stumps. this is Prunus americana on Prunus virginiana.. will take some better photos. If I just wait a couple of weeks these can be bark grafts, which are super fast and fun… I’m out field grafting daily for a few weeks until I run out of scions or things to graft them onto ;)

grafting haskap. will it work? not sure, must be possible. I have three maxine thompson varieties, initially tried to root as hardwood but it didn’t respond, maybe a dryer 70-80% perlite mix could do it. haskap roots easily from softwood. anyway I have one scion of each as a backup to graft. I’ll also add some foil protection around these to keep the sun off them. when I grafted haskap onto wild honeysuckle last year it didn’t leaf out indicating the scions dried out, so will try bagging it. #propagation #haskap #grafting

my haskap grafts from the other day covered for the next 2 weeks with tin foil to keep them cool. This can help take for more sensitive grafts. I might use it on sea buckthorn as well.

a little canopy reduction on this siberian crab I planted twenty years ago. I topped a few larger trees ahead of grafting them over this spring.

b118 rootstocks from our stoolbed. finished apple grafting today, final count around 300 for next year. This is our second winter taking fruit tree orders so still finding out how many to grow.

sending out scions this week, I have a few left just for shipping in Canada. #grafting

haskap / honey berry grafted onto wild honeysuckle. There are a few species here, small and bushy rarely 3ft tall, another one that grows like a large shrub 8ft or more, also a vining type. Experimentally I’m trying cultivar haskap onto two of the species to see if they grow, there are some reports that there can be compatibility - they are all in the same genre. The larger bush form will be an advantage if it works, like making a standard with currants. #grafting

wolf willow and sea buckthorn are in the same family, so I’m trialing grafts with a couple of kinds of sea buckthorn onto the trees. other genera in the family do have compatibility, so maybe there’s compatibility here. #grafting

root grafted prunus onto mustang cherry and some Nanking cherry this morning. I woke up and realized that I could probably trim the roots from small stock trees that were just potted up - to use up left over scions in the fridge and rest this method of grafting on prunus. The source plants are just leafing out and won’t be harmed by the pruning, they’ll get extra watering. Does root grafting late in the spring work? I don’t know, I suspect the trees will need this season and next year in a bed to get up size. Some combinations trialing are Manchurian apricot, prunus maackii (Manchurian cherry), cherry plum, double flowering plum (Prunus × blireiana), American plum, and various plum cultivars onto mustang cherry and Nanking (prunus tomentosa) roots. Grafts were like a reverse modified cleft, this seems the most practical for root grafting. whip and tongue is only possible with thick material, otherwise roots just break. Success is one of the possible outcomes! #grafting

grafting over sea buckthorn with some cultivars, the stock trees are all male so it will be nice to have some fruit and also grow out softwood to root. #grafting #seabuckthorn #seaberry

top working stock trees with all sorts of prunus.. mostly to grow budwood for July and more scion wood to collect in the winter. Some trees are just starting to wake up in southern Manitoba, most are still dormant. Apple and pear grafting starts are now and runs through May. #grafting

bench grafts right before they went in the ground. the first half are on b118 from our new stoolbed, second half are root grafts on M. baccata .. I have a variety of rootstocks and types of grafts this year so it will be interesting to compare how well they grow. #grafting

bench grafted apples are waking up and ready to plant. #grafting

top working chokecherry this week. I have so much of it here, working to develop it as a resource with some in house propagation methods. One of my goal this summer will be to use this method to grow out softwood and trial many prunus species and cultivars for softwood rooting potential. Another one is budwood production for July grafting. #grafting

night grafting with a headlamp. I’ve had a few late nights working around the nursery with these bright led headlamps. Here I’m working over some tall saskatoon to russian pears at around shoulder height to stay above the browse line. #grafting

here’s how I prep parafilm strips for grafting. about 0.5 x 3” with the backing removed, stuffed into a bag in my grafting belt. Usually I’ll cut enough for 50-100 grafts at a time, which is about all I do in a day depending on the weather. #grafting

toka plum interstem for cherry plum on chokecherry stock. trialing toka and a few others as interstems. #grafting

field grafting, been waiting all winter for this. ;) last year I made temp labels with a uv resistant garden marker just onto the tail of the white budding tape - and it sucked, they faded within six weeks. This year I’ve printed vinyl labels ahead of time, so going out to graft I have the permanent label done. I know a metal tag is forever, but these should be good for at least five years. I include details like the year grafted and source in the print, and I fired off 100 labels in a few mins. #grafting

Here’s how I like to pack scion wood for field grafting

chokecherry buds started to swell today in zone 3b southern Manitoba, they’re the first trees I’ve seen start to wake up. this gets things rolling for a grafting project, I have a pile of scion wood to trial on chokecherry for compatibility, and about 50% is going to have an interstem that proved compatible last year. There’s 2 goals: 1. to find all compatible prunus on P. Virginiana, and to use them as interstems to make this prolific rootstock work for cultivars plums and other stone fruit around our property and to document the compatibility for others. 2. Developing a system to rapidly grow out cultivar softwood from limited scion material for rooting under mist. own root plums, cherries, apricots

apple bench grafts for this spring. I didn’t count them, should be lots. There’s a fun selection of cultivars and style of grafting in here. Our greenhouse is still cool during the day so they’re going to callus in here for the next week or so and then go into cold storage until mid May. #grafting #applegrafting

a few apple root grafts from this morning. #grafting

grafting season started today, the snow finally thawed from our heeled in rootstocks. first graft shown. #grafting #applegrafting

bench grafting russian pears in my kitchen this morning. #grafting

apple bench grafts all tucked away. #grafting #appletrees

trying a few of these, apple root grafts using a 4”length of root onto a 6” scion, the union buried and with this method it’s consider beneficial if the scion also roots. Piece root grafting like used to be very common a hundred years ago when everyone was working with seedling rootstocks. I’m interested in these old techniques and their advantages in a cold climate where full sized rootstocks are preferred over dwarfing clonal options. #grafting

Shmaven our polydactyl Siamese cat is very interested in scion wood, here he’s helping me unpack some.

One of my grafted Toka plum trees top worked onto choke cherry, start of July last year. #grafting

going to make some old timey grafting wax. if you ever come across these recipes that list resin or rosin in the ingredients, it’s pine resin, or pine gum. Maybe it was just an off the shelf thing years ago, today you can order it from amazon. #grafting

bridge grafting to fix vole damage #grafting #orchard

planted our first season’s apple bench grafts today. 12 zone 3 hardy varieties on full size Siberian crab apple rootstocks. I’ve had them in cold storage for about three weeks and the weather has been nice enough they should be ok. A few more nights of light frost likely, but things are leafing out. The apples in our orchard are just starting to show signs of waking up. #grafting #treenursery #permaculture

wild rootstock project continues, we’re grafting plums onto choke cherry and pears onto saskatoon. (prunus virginiana and amelanchier alnifolia) .. selecting vigorous previous year growth, 12-36”. the goal is to find the most graft compatible zone 3 hardy species/cultivars. there are some good candidates, we’re working not just different cultivars but different species of prunus - all of which are known to have some compatibility but have not been fully explored or studied in our climate and for our hobbyist / food forest application. this also serves as a reserve of scion wood for next year when we’ll have many more typical pear and plum rootstocks ready to graft onto. #grafting #permaculture

this season I’ve been using budding tape for tying grafts in the field, leaving a tail makes for a quick label. I’ll come back later on with better tags. UV resistant marker is important. #grafting

frameworked an old apple tree. it’s a parkland I planted in 2004 but never got around to pruning, so it was 25’ tall with all the apples up high. Now it’s a #frankentree .. #grafting

bark grafts work well on larger stock and later on in spring when the bark is slipping, it just pos apart in a satisfying way. This is Toka plum on choke cherry, before it was wrapped up. #grafting #fruittree #fruittrees #graftingfruittrees

Patterson pride plum grafted on wild choke cherry three weeks ago. We’re running an experiment to see which varieties are most graft compatible and following up on them over time to learn if this can be truely viable for a cold hardy and prolific rootstock. #grafting #graftingtrees #plumgrafting #chokecherry

Apple on Saskatoon graft. In late summer well past grafting season I grafted onto about a dozen small trees, happy to see most are leafing out. Saskatoon is in the Rosacea family with apples and pears and has been used experimentally as a dwarfing rootstock for them. There’s some conventional wisdom that pears will work, but few reports about Malus. This is an excellent result and will be followed up on. #grafting

grafting plums to wild rootstocks all week. The prunus virginiana are just about to lead out. Selecting only vigorous growing trees with 12-36” of growth last year. #grafting #prunusvirginiana #graftingplumtrees #fieldgrafting #permaculture

red wonder is one of the varieties I grafted this weekend, haven’t tried the apples yet but they’re hardy to zone 3 and super red so we included them. Might be fun to try breeding with down the road. #graftingtrees #applegrafting

handful of bench grafted apples on seedling rootstocks. these are parafilm with a grafting rubber, I found this worked well. in the field I would usually tie the graft first, but with handling the wet roots and some smaller diameter material parafilm first seemed better to keep out water and dirt from the union. could have dipped the tops in wax but a small amount of parafilm on the tip was easy enough. By end of the day I had these down to about 90s ea, 30 in an hour includes all the prep #grafting #applegrafting

logistics of bench grafting when a late snow fall covers the nursery, our rootstocks are all heeled in and frozen under a pile of mulch and snow. Was expecting to bench graft a few hundred apples mid April and set them in the greenhouse to callous, but Manitoba weather has other plans - the highs are still below freezing so maybe.. I should bench graft in may? #backyardnursery #backyardorchard

scion wood arrived from summerland. 2-3’ whips, nice stuff #scions #grafting

grafting season starts here around the end of April, still trying to decide the best method to tie my grafts. I like the idea of using the budding tape and leaving a tail to quickly label the graft, then come back later with a tag. The natural raffia has some appeal, and when I cut it off it can just go on the ground and biodegrade. Parafilm worked well last season, it’s slower than painting the grafts but not much and it’s easier to carry around, and it also just biodegrades. #grafting

grafting plums onto wild choke cherries #grafting #chokecherry #backyardorchard

for whip and tongue grafts parafilm can be coiled like raffia to bing the graft tight, then cover to seal the union and scion. #grafting #applegrafting #backyardorchard

Russian pear grafted into wild Saskatoon #grafting #backyardnursery #fruittreenursery #orchard #backyardorchard

first apple bud from May 1 grafts appeared. Trees are funny, there’s still a few hold outs around the orchard that are dormant , others had green tips two weeks ago. #fruittreenursery #grafting #graftingplants #applegrafting

#grafting season is on in southern Manitoba. #fruittreenursery #fruittrees #backyardnursery

whip and tongue graft right before wrapping it up tight with parafilm. So many grafts to do this spring, still waiting on the trees

prunus leafing out. started grafting a few days ago, we’re just waiting for trees to wake up and show a little green #plumtree