Frank, I've had the same questions. I have chipbudded to older wood with limited success. Budding to older wood is very touchy too, although on occasion it can work. Once a friend of mine bark grafted right to a six inch trunk in the middle of the tree successfully!

As to thickness of the bud or chip I like a bud with a lot of bark but a minimum of wood underneath; some people remove the wood but I don't feel comfortable picking at it. My thought is that the wood is dead matter that has to be dealt with by the tree one way or another, so you don't want too much of it ... I guess the same has to be true of chips. Still, like you say, cambium contact is the big thing.

Here's to good success grafting this year. In another week or two I'll nip a bud stick from a nearby apricot and try to bud my Marianna rootstocks. Wish me luck, ay ...?

:-)M

I'm still working on the apricots. The weather has cooled down a lot finally so hopefully I can get a bunch of buds put in place the next couple days.

This is a Satsuma that I placed about a month ago (on a nectarine seedling). Part of the rubber band broke off on the right side, but the bud still is nice and green...

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I'm putting as many varieties I can on one tree. Have no idea why, maybe just to prove I can have pluots, apricots, peaches (of all types), plums (of all types) on one tree.

Go for it, Frank. I don't know what it is about all this Frankentree creation, but it is fun.

I (think) I'm learning that for any meaningful production of a given variety the graft needs to be made to become a scaffold branch. But I have cheated on this rule and have some grafts that do "OK" as secondary branches off of large scaffolds, letting both the scaffold and the secondary support pencils. And I have grafted a few to replace pencils, and will try to maintain those as pencils with the hope of getting half a dozen from each pencil. That way I can squeeze more varieties on my poor, confused Liberty apple.

My pear I have been more disciplined with, and have kept each variety as a distinct scaffold branch. But I have too many scaffolds because I want too many varieties!

So it goes. Still a hoot, though.

:-)M

An interesting thing happened on my pear tree when I tried to graft to old wood. Someone here suggested I try the Plugger from Lee Valley. It's a drill bit designed to drill a perfect hole for grafting to. Well it didn't work, but it did encourage the tree to put out a new branch that I could graft onto. This may be the route to take if you want to graft to older wood; I think you cut into the bark where you want to encourage branch growth (there's a name for the technique but it eludes me)

I know this will take a lot longer, but it may have greater success in the end.

In the photo you can see where I tried to graft to, and underneath the tree put out a nice new branch.

Sorry, but can't figure out how to resize. The photo looks awful.

I should just try budding a few chips to some old wood and take note of it next spring/summer... Be interesting to see what happens.

I have noticed that my big trees I chip bud on to, the buds growth is very vigorous, vs a smaller container tree. I'll give an example...

This is last years chip bud (Puget Gold grafted to a Tomcot...not sure of the rootstock). The branch is nearly 6 ft tall (its needed to be pruned, but this summer has been too busy/too late now). You can still see a little parafilm.
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