Successful persimmon grafting
About a month ago, I grafted named varieties onto our seedling American persimmons.
I used two different techniques, whip grafting the hard-to-get-to
plants up in the powerline pasture and bark grafting the more accessible
plants where our pullets and cockerels are currently grazing. Since I'm
a lazy farmer whenever possible, I'd only been watching the accessible
plants, and was disappointed to see that one piece of scionwood had
broken off and that the other two pieces of scionwood showed no signs of
life.
But when the weeds in the
powerline pasture got tall enough to make it worthwhile to tether our
goats up on the hill, I brought along the camera and took a look at the
whip-grafted persimmons. The result? 75% success, which is pretty
awesome for this notoriously difficult-to-graft species!
Now,
if only I hadn't tethered Artemesia quite so close the the Yates
persimmon, bringing my success rate on that hillside back down to
50%....
On the plus side, I still
have hopes that some more of the grafted persimmons might sprout from
the scionwood later this summer. After all, the scionwood on three trees
looks good...just seemingly dormant. But if I was going to repeat my
endeavor, based on this data, I'd go entirely for whip grafts in the
future.
Since it looks like all
of the seedling rootstock is still alive, I should get a second chance
on those trees, snipping scionwood off the successful grafts and adding
them to the unsuccessful trees next spring. In the meantime, I'll be
babying our successful grafts and hoping for fruits as early as
2018...if Artemesia keeps her mouth to herself.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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