Question. Why do you pull off the grafting tape while the plant tissue is still "new, tender, juicy"?

It's kind of like us when we get sun on a spot we normally have covered it's always that way. If your legs are white and you uncover them and they get sun you could say the results are a sunburn because that skin is more tender than that on your arms. The result is the same with grafts here the tape is pulled and the calloused new tissue is underneath and grasshoppers love that stuff. Similarly when you trim lower branches the trunk should be painted white with indoor paint here to prevent sunburn because our summers exceed 100 degrees. The new graft bark is green in appearance and does not harden up until it's exposed to wind and sun awhile. By painting it with pruning seal the sun burns it off over time and grasshoppers hate the taste of tar. Great question !

Thanks for the response. In the past when I unwrapped a graft on topworked pear trees and rejoiced that "It Worked!!" when I saw the brand new, greenish, healthy tissue that had grown over a period of weeks to fill in around the graft wounds......I thought that, OK, the graft worked, the wound is healed up, and I can now just toss the tape and see if it continues to grow more mature over time. In less than 2 weeks the brand new, greenish, healthy tissue became discolored, dried, and died. As did the scion. Sad and mad. That was the L A S T time that I left unwrapped new tissue exposed to the elements. A super grafter here has said that new tissue on graft wounds develops better/well when in the darkness under wraps. The stretchable wrapping used here expands during the whole growing season as the graft grows in size. I usually do not pull off the wrapping until many months later, and the tissue always looks to be much more mature and ready to face the cruel world. No more discoloring, drying, and dying since. The exception to this is when the tissue is growing fast and bulges outward in between the spiraled wrapping of 1/4" wide rubber band. In that situation, I clip off the too-tight band and loosely wrap some white, plastic, unglued, flagging tape over immature tissue to shade it for additional maturing time while shielded from Sun blasting.....Because locusts from 1" to 4" in length can fly up to branch tips with tender scion leaves just emerging, I make loose, fluffy, thin "tents" from cut & taped grocery bags to cover the scions with and unwelcome them. As the leaves grow in size, the tents are tossed. At least the leaves get a running start before the raiders will spot them.

Here is a picture of the damage for those who need to visualize it. Sometimes a picture says a thousand words.

Copingwithclay I know what you mean and I agree with what your saying. If I hit them with pruning seal its effectively something I don't need to pull later. I was far overdue to pull the tape on these grafts I made in March. If I would have pulled them in June like I normally due the problem might not have occurred because the grasshoppers are not that big yet. This time of year their are thousands and they are big and they eat anything but the tastiest stuff first so graft leaves etc on some trees are gone but the trees can recover from that. Our winter stayed an extra month this year and put us behind.

Have the same problem here Clark. Grasshoppers are awful. So far they won't strip trees 15' tall, but they will defoliate young trees like crazy. Sometimes it can be very hard to get young trees established.

Basically I have to keep them sprayed w/ insecticide weekly. It doesn't cure the problem, but it does help. The grasshoppers here won't touch peaches. They just eat the foliage of apples, and plums mostly.

I like to pull wrappings off bud grafts after they callus in. I generally bud around 1st of Sept. (Just finished w/ budding for this fall- 65 trees. At least I think I'm done). I like to unwrap the grafts about a month later to check them. After I unwrap them, I very carefully paint the callus tissue (without painting the bud itself) with latex paint. I use a very small artist paint brush to accomplish this.

The reason I unwrap is to see if the bud grafts are viable, so I know whether or not to move them to their permanent planting place before they break dormancy in the spring. I don't want to move a tree which had a failed T-bud.

Olpea It must just be a Kansas thing. My peaches are like yours untouched for some reason. The grasshoppers chewed holes in some of my nylon screens that cover my windows. When they run out of everything else they have been known to chew on our fence posts.

Here is a link that might be useful: Grasshopper info