Any success with grafting,air layer, cuttings for

[emorata]

Fruit trees to share your success with forum members. I'm interested in adding more trees inexpensively in the future with any of these techniques.....any input from members that have found success trying any of these propogation techniques.

I'm sure the success rates would be extremely high for patient gardeners....

[Hotzcatz]

We've air layered peach trees and ohias that have survived, but our survival rate of the air layers is about one in four. I have an apple tree that was started from a root sucker and that is about five feet tall now. The air layered peach did much better since on it's second year from being air layered it fruited. We did use a fairly large branch to air layer and the apple root sucker was pretty small it was just about 4" tall to start with.

Mac nuts start from seed real easily but it takes years before you get more nuts. I think I may try air layering some of them, too, to get nuts quicker.

[sansei]

I have developed a few opinions about various techniques after researching and trying some of them.

Air layering and rooting hardwood cuttings both develop roots from a callous that grows out of the cambium layer. As a result, the root ball develops from a ring around the branch. Plants with fibrous root balls tend to do well, but those that develop tap roots do not. They tend to be shallow rooted and not as drought tolerant. One technique used on deciduous plant cuttings is forcing the callous by over wintering them in a freeze proof location (sometimes buried in the ground). You can also wrap the cuttings in wet newspaper, place them in a plastic bag and put them in the vegetable bin of the refrigerator for several months. I have tried this with rose cuttings but failed because I let the cuttings dry out once I put them in soil. Forcing is used commercially for grape and olive propagation. It would be interesting to see if the technique could be adapted to tropicals but I expect air layering is better.

Trees can be stimulated to produce root suckers by digging around it and bruising the roots. The problem with root suckers is that most commercially bought trees are grafted onto root stock and you may not get the kind of fruit you want. It is a good way to get root stock that you can graft onto though.

Seeds work well with heirloom or naturalized trees but hybrids may revert to the characteristics of one of its parents. You can always use the plant for root stock and graft from a known host.

Grafting is useful for more than propagation. Even fruits that are self-pollinating will set more fruit if there are compatible pollinators nearby and one way to make sure of that is to graft different varieties on one tree. I can say from personal experience that it is easy to do on fruits from genus prunus (peaches, plums), pyrus (pears) and malus (apples).

[Hotzcatz]

There are a lot of mac nut trees nearby that have branches of a superior tree grafted onto them so apparently it can be done with genus macnutus too.

[emorata]

thanks for fantastic information above, i'm sure it will be a good resource for those of us that want to experiment in more detail and post our results in this forum.

I'm sure grafting on various starts from parents is a viable option along with air layering and other propogation means.

mahalo,

noel