31 Apple Tree Grafts

On Saturday and Sunday I finally got round to grafting my apple trees.

My root stocks heeled in a pot ready to be grafted

 I used the whip and tongue graft on them all, and I even splashed out and brought some grafting tape and wax to seal them with. Lots of different types of apple trees collected from the local area (thanks again compost woman for your two) so if they all take I should have over 50 varieties of apple!


My collection of Scion wood

 The only difficulty I had was when some of my scion stock wasn't very wide. Here I took the advice of the books and just made sure that one side of the cambium layer was touching.

First two done

 Once I grafted up a batch I then heated up the grafting wax in the microwave to seal all my grafts.
To do this I dipped the cut end and painted the wax over the join before dipping them in cold water to set the wax. I would have dipped the whole graft in if I had a jar that was deep enough but doing it in this way seems fine.

Melted grafting wax



Grafted up and sealed waiting to go into the ground

In the end I grafted up 9 M25 trees and 22 MM106 trees. I didn't graft one M25 and two MM106 stocks as I'm going to attempt to grow my own root stocks from these by stooling, but I'll do that in another post.
I've just healed these trees back into the pot for now and at the weekend I'll create a nursery bed for them to grow in for the first year or so.
Lets hope they all take or else I could be learning budding in the summer!