Lee Senior explains the top technique for gaining increased vigour, disease resistance, yield and speed.
Several decades ago, I remember as a horticultural student being shown grafted plants for the first time in a nursery field. At that time, grafted plants were quite unlike anything I’d seen before with two plants basically joined together!
How could this be? We were shown and subsequently had a go at something that to this day remains one of the more intriguing horticultural techniques. Inevitably over time, the use of broader grafting techniques has increased to the point where in many cases it is now the expected normal with a lot of plant nursery stock.These days it is quite unusual to buy a fruit tree that hasn’t been grafted by the nursery.
Grafting in its simplest form is a historic, time-served and rather skilful form of propagation-and there are many forms of it. There is no doubt it is a satisfying but challenging way to increase stock where other methods are not effective. Grafting manipulates nature in a positive, well-intentioned way. It is a technique used to create new‘ super’ plants that will (it is hoped) outperform other non-grafted plants. There are plenty of things that can and do go wrong but commercially success rates are very good these days.
GRAFTING STYLES AND TECHNIQUES
Grafting is a generic term, encompassing a number of different techniques, many of which are beyond the scope of this relatively short article. A common type of grafting that many of us will have seen for instance on ornamental shrubs and some trees is splice grafting. Meanwhile, whip and tongue grafting (a technique often used for fruit trees) is probably the one many of us are most familiar with. In both cases the top half of the graft is the plant that grows in a normal way and is called a scion. During splice grafting the scion is typically around 1-2 years old, pencil thick and should be cut to a length of 8-10 inches.
The scion is then inserted into a cut made into the rootstock to match. For the graft to be successful the scion needs to knit or ‘fuse’ with a different rootstock which has to be compatible with. The scion and rootstock need to be in tight contact with each other until they fuse or marry together. To achieve this a number of aides can be used such as tapes, bands, clips, seals and even wax! Generally both the scion and the rootstock should be from the same family. Occasionally this can include plants not from the same species ( as long as it is the same family). Splice grafting (has a number of other names) is normally done while the top part of the plant is dormant before the onset of spring. This is not the case with fruit trees that are grafted using the whip and tongue technique using chip budding or T-budding. The type of grafting used determines what time of year the graft is undertaken. Bud grafting is a different technique. Here a bud is inserted into the stem of another compatible plant.
This article extract was taken from the Spring 2025 edition of The Country Smallholder. To read the article in full, you can buy the issue here.
