Grafting season May 2018

When you graft a tree you have a root stock and a scion from at least one other tree and you take advantage of the way plants and trees grow to connect them together. This can have big advantages for the grower because there are many species of plants and trees that do not come 'true' from seed, which means every seedling will be atleast a  little different from it's parents. This can be a disadvantage if you need fruits or nuts, or any other crop to produce in a reliable way year after year, or have a consistent size fruit, nut, etc. So by grafting you can take an orchard of trees grown from seeds that are all very different from each other and you can make the tops of them the same. Your roots and sometimes the lower part of the trunk will still be the 'seedling', but the top of the tree that is producing fruit or nuts will be what you grafted. This is just my simplified grafting explanation and some things can be different in some situations.

Spring is traditionally a good time for many different kinds of grafts. This spring I focused on grafting many pecan trees at our farm. These were mostly wild pecan trees that were between 5-20 feet tall. Almost all of them were bark grafted. For more information on bark grafting pecan trees it is very hard to beat Bill Reid's northern pecan blog as a reference. Most of the pecan trees I grafted were to the variety 'Kanza'. I also grafted some to 'Major' and 'Yates 68' and a few others. Next year when many more of our pecan sprouts are larger I will be grafting many more to these varieties and a few others. We focus on grafting only pecan varieties that are currently very pecan scab resistant because there are excellent scab resistant varieties out there right now and it will be one less disease/pest we will have to worry about.

Peach scion beginning to break bud grafted onto an American plum rootstock

Another common species we have around our farm are different species of wild native plums - mostly American plums. There is some research indicating that as long as you are willing to prune off the prolific suckers which will occur from the ground - using American plums as a rootstock can be a great way to have a very hardy and naturally dwarfing rootstock to graft peaches onto. You will notice in the picture above the peach scion is just beginning to break bud. When I start seeing the leaves fully unfurl I will go in with pruning shears and cut off all leaves and growth below the scion to ensure the rootstock does not out compete the scion.