It’s that time of year again, not quite Fall yet, but the plants don’t know it. Shh… don’t tell them.
Fall officially starts tomorrow, but the recent drop in temperatures have given the plants (and us) a reprieve from the blistering summer heat. Additionally, we’ve gotten much needed rain after a horribly dry summer.
Everything’s growing. Gorgeous new leaves pop and flowers burst—filling the air with the sweet, marvelous perfume and welcoming new fruit to the garden. Dare I say, it’s nice out.
These are the months we crave in Central Florida (bask in their glory—they’ll be over sooner than we’d like them to be).
And with these flushes of beautiful new growth and budding tree comes another time of superb grafting (Spring is a great time to graft most fruit trees as well).
For those unfamiliar, grafting is the process of altering a plant’s genetics.
Looking like a mad scientist in a lab room mixed with a particularly gruesome coroner, in grafting season, plant nerds around the world slash away with their knives and pruners, decapitating their victims—leaving behind flushes of new growth, gorgeous green leaves, and several inches or even possibly feet of plant material on the ground.
How awful! Though, fear not, these brutal plant massacres are for the pursuit of good, and the only victims are some seedlings that likely have a deficiency in some way anyways. They’ll be better now… If the graft takes.
As stated, grafting is a way of altering a plant’s genetics. There can be several reasons for this process.
Main Reasons to Graft:
- The seedling, which we’ll call the ‘rootstock’ is of inferior quality (possibly not true to seed—more on that later—, or is a less preferred variety)
- The tree takes an obscenely long time to fruit from seed (grafted trees can produce fruit much quicker as they share the genetic makeup of the tree they’re removed from, oftentimes a fruiting specimen)
Let’s start with an example. We go to the grocery store and eat the ripest, juiciest, and best Tangerine we’ve ever had.
We keep the seeds and plant the buggers into a small pot we have lying around the shed for some reason—there’s a bunch of them there, so we fill them with dirt.
There’s a high spot in the yard over there so we take a shovel to it and use this terrible, sandy junk, as the base for our new seed. Despite all odds, it grows!
In our native Florida soil, none-the-less. It’s a miracle!
We water it and grow it for countless years until it fruits and to our utter dismay, it is the most sour and nastiest thing we’ve ever eaten. How? Why is the world so cruel?
Unfortunately, not all edible plants grow true from seed, which means that the fruit quality and other characteristics may not match its mother plant’s genetics.
The reason being that the genetics are fertilized and crossed with another plant and therefore only share 50% of its DNA from the mother tree.
This makes the seeds variable and is quite necessary for finding and introducing new varieties.
Though, if we want a particular variety of any plant, it often can be grafted to ensure it is of the same fine genetics as the parent plant as a graft is 100% genetic clone to the mother tree.
A tree can possess many forms which make it desirable.
In a fruit tree this could be incredibly large fruit, fruit that has a longer season, higher yields, longer shelf life, thicker skin, thinner skin, larger/prettier flowers, smaller leaves, bigger leaves, variegated leaves, and other physical characteristics, soil tolerances, cold hardiness (a powerful one for us in Central Florida) and a multitude of other factors.
Seriously it is impossible to list them all and there’s reasons for all of them. Some things are necessary for commercial production such as thicker skin and longer-shelf life while other factors may be more desirable to backyard growers—like flavor.
So, we take those Tangerine seeds and grow them.
Only, once they’re budding out and of the right caliper trunk, we graft onto them (in this reductionist example, we won’t go into that some trees are often grafted onto other species in the same family such as Trifoliata orange).
There are several methods of grafting, but for simplicity we’ll mention only cleft grafts, which requires cutting off the top of the canopy of the rootstock (or any terminal branches, whereas citrus and other like fruits can have multiple grafted varieties on one ‘cocktail’ tree allowing for lemons, limes, tangerines, etc. all on the same root system).
Aside: Trees must be grafted onto a compatible rootstock. We couldn’t say graft a Peach onto citrus rootstock, but we could graft a lemon onto a lime rootstock since they’re in the same family.
We then take a branch from an established tree which possesses some desirable characteristic, for example the exact tree that produced that Tangerine you loved. We check if it is creating new growth.
Right before new leaves shoot out (showing the hormone is in the plant’s cells), we remove a branch from the tree preferably one matching the diameter of the rootstock plant exactly. This branch, is now called a ‘scion.’
Aside: For our example we’ll say it is removed from the tree, though approach grafts can allow for branches to remain on the parent tree during the grafting process (only being cut after successful new growth).
We then cut a slice down the center of the trunk of our rootstock, gently rocking our knife until the wood splits.
We’ll then wrap the scion with a stretchy material that seals in moisture, since the scion won’t receive any water from the rootstock for 7-10 days.
After wrapping the scion, we’ll cut the base into a ‘V’ shape which will then be inserted the rootstock, matching the cambium layers (the layer right inside the bark) and we’ll seal the union of the two plants with more stretchy film such as the grafting tape ‘Buddy Tape.’
We may then place this plant in the shade and water it thoroughly. After a few weeks, if the graft is successful, the plant will heal, and new growth will appear above the graft union.
The tree will now possess the desirable characteristics above the graft (any branches below the graft shall always be removed).
This process can also be particularly helpful for exotic plants such as Jaboticaba or Avocado which take a long time to fruit.
Avocado seedlings can take anywhere from 10-15 years to fruit, whereas grafted trees can fruit consistently within 2-3 years.
Taking scion branches from fruiting trees can thus shorten the time necessary for the plant to flower and produce the crop we’re growing it for.
Grafting takes some practice and not all grafts will succeed, but it’s a fun practice.
My first-time learning was a workshop put on by the Central Florida Fruit Society over two years ago. I grafted two Mango scions onto a forked rootstock.
One of my grafts succeeded. I cut off the other side of the tree and watched as the scion grew, as I trained it to straighten out. Now, I have much more success and have multi-grafted Loquat, Mango and Jaboticaba.
We can all grow more of the fruits we enjoy by grafting on those favored varieties that make our mouths water, our hearts race and excite us to continue growing fruit.
If you rather leave the grafting to the pros, we’d love to sell you grafted fruit trees that will yield abundant and delicious fruit for you and your family.