Introduction to Grafting

If you have purchased a fruit tree from a nursery, there's a high likelihood that it was grafted. Grafting offers several benefits, including improved disease resistance, faster fruit production, and the ability to combine desirable traits from different plants. So, what exactly is grafting? Grafting is the process of taking the top part of the plant you want (scion) and attaching it to a root system capable of supporting it (rootstock). This technique is particularly useful for obtaining specific fruit and plant characteristics that are difficult to achieve through other propagation methods.

However, there are a few fruit trees that can be grown easily from cuttings, like figs, that are very seldom grafted except for niche reasons. Most domesticated fruits that come to mind, like apples, pears, peaches, pecans, plums, and persimmons, are grafted when used for commercial production or the nursery trade. Grafting is a labor-intensive process that requires some skill to master, which is one reason fruit trees often cost more than landscape trees and shrubs that can be propagated from seed or cuttings. To understand what is involved, let's dive into the process of grafting.

Most grafting is typically done in late winter and early spring. Before you can get started, you need to have healthy scion wood and rootstock for grafting. Growing a healthy rootstock should start at least a year in advance, but for some slower-growing species like pecan, it can often take two to three years to grow a rootstock large enough to graft. Acquiring healthy scion wood also requires proper planning a few years in advance.

Cleft Grafting Step-by-Step

As mentioned earlier, the scion is the plant you want to propagate. For persimmon, this would be a named variety like Fuyu, which performs well in most residential settings in Louisiana. To obtain Fuyu scion wood for grafting, you need some Fuyu trees to start with. The best scion wood for grafting has plenty of buds (at least 2, but preferably 4) and is ideally one year old, although healthy two-year-old wood can also be used. To obtain wood large enough for grafting, you need a well-established yet youthful plant to harvest from. Nurseries specializing in grafting heavily prune trees annually to encourage the growth of larger, juvenile wood ideal for grafting.

Once you have the scion wood and rootstock, how do you splice them together? In brief, the goal is to align the cambium layers, the thin green lines just beneath the surface, so they will heal together. Once healed, they will act as one unit, with the scion becoming the top portion of the plant and the rootstock serving as the root system. You need to monitor your rootstock throughout the life of the tree. It may occasionally send up shoots from the roots or lower trunk that can displace the grafted top. The method of aligning the cambium layers varies depending on the grafting technique used. Here, we will focus on cleft grafting.

To begin, you need a healthy rootstock. In these examples, I am grafting a persimmon in the field to produce more scion wood for future grafting. The first significant step is to cut off the majority of the above-ground portion of the rootstock. Cleft grafting is typically done close to the ground, sometimes even near the soil line. When starting out, I recommend grafting a bit higher, as shown in the photo, to give yourself some room for error. If you make a mistake, you can always cut lower and restart if you began higher initially.