Grafting Trees 2019

Now that trees in the orchards are beginning to leaf out, it is the perfect time to get a start on grafting for the year. For the most part there are two species I am grafting a lot of this year: Pecans (Carya illinoiensis) and Pawpaw (Asimina triloba)

I have been using four grafts for most of the trees I'm working with this year, a bark graft, whip and tongue graft, three flap, and a four flap graft. The main factor in determining what graft you can use is the diameter of your scion wood and your root stock (and your imagination of course). Some grafts will just not work for some size combinations of your scion wood and root stock, but can work really well for other combinations.

A lot of times you may have relatively small diameter pieces of scion wood, which can be fine for some grafts, but is not ideal for others. Using a whip and tongue graft can still be a good choice if you have small scion wood and small-medium (or even large) root stock. Personally, if my root stock is large enough (which I mainly graft onto large root stocks) I will use a bark graft even if my scion wood is relatively small. I prefer the bark graft for a few reasons.

1) I use staples in my bark graft so I make sure the scion is very tight against the rootstock.
2) I have also done a lot of bark grafts so I have gotten relatively quick at doing them (this obviously becomes a factor if you have a lot of grafts to do in a set amount of time)
3) The trees seem to have a strong union. In the past few years I have only lost one bark graft due to wind damage.


I have mentioned before that I take a different path from some other growers in that I focus on looking at what species are doing well in an area (or could do very well) and encouraging them. I certainly do some tree planting, but often if you have an ideal site for a species and you have some of a given species nearby, those seeds will get spread and will grow. You just have to know how to find the new sprouts and make sure they don't die. Pecans are one example of this in our state that is easy to cite because so much of Missouri's pecan production has been (and still is) from wild trees. These are un-grafted native trees that grew up and nobody bothered to cut them down, so they started producing pecans.

Most of the pecans I grafted this year at our farm were wild sprouts (which as I have mentioned in previous posts WILL come up around farms where other pecan trees are growing if people don't mow them all off, and/or consistently overgraze an area). The same is true of most of the pawpaw trees I grafted.

ABOVE: This is a pawpaw tree which was bark grafted. Many of the pawpaw trees I grafted this year were in partial-heavy shade.

BELOW:  In some areas I went through and did some canopy thinning, or looked for openings in the canopy where I knew pawpaws near that opening would get more sunlight. Just under this canopy opening were a few good looking pawpaw trees that were grafted. The tree in the center had died and was allowing a good amount of sunlight to reach the pawpaw trees below. Sunlight can be a HUGE limiting factor in the production of pawpaw fruit.

BELOW: Walking through one of the future orchards I found this somewhat small, not particularly attractive looking, tree sprout. Closer inspection showed it to be a pecan tree sprout and in another year or two it could be an excellent candidate for three flap or bark grafting. In the meantime I would like to select one of the sprouts to become the main trunk, so I did a little pruning.

BELOW: This is the tree after pruning. Essentially I just selected the trunk with the largest diameter and cut away everything else at the ground, and flagged the remaining trunk to be caged (to protect it from deer) and then grafted in the next year or two.