Grafting Fruit Trees

I've always thought grafting was an amazing bio-hack. It seemed like an incredibly difficult task to get a branch from one tree to grow on another. It turns out it's not that hard, especially because there are a lot of resources available. If you search the web for examples, though, you'll be overwhelmed by all the different techniques. But first, where do you get cuttings to graft onto you trees. What we did was to go to a scion exchange. This is where you pay $5 for admission and can take any scions, or fruit tree cuttings, that you want to try grafting. There are also demonstrations of techniques that work for the types of trees in your area that you want to graft. After you've selected a technique, you can then search for more information and videos.

We tried both bark grafting and cleft grafting. I think the cleft graft is much easier, but it requires cutting toward yourself, so you have to be extremely careful. I used a very sharp grafting knife and put a spool around the root stock to protect my hand, but even that was very scary.

We did grafts on apples, pit fruits, pears, and citrus in two grafting sessions. A little more than half of the grafts were successful. Not bad for a first try. Apples and pit fruits were easier. Citrus trees were more difficult. Some of the fastest growing grafts were onto a volunteer nectarine tree - it must have grown from a pit I tossed into the back yard. The fruits on these tree have never been good, so it was a good candidate for grafting.

Here's a photo of the nectarine a couple of months after the graft:

And here's a photo of a Meyer lemon on Eureka lemon root stock.

Unfortunately, in many cases I can't tell you what the scion is until after we have a harvest because I tagged it with Sharpie on plastic and the weather faded it to unreadability! Scratching the name of the scion type onto an aluminum tag works much better.