[NAFEX] grafting named mulberry onto wild tree
Lucky Pittman
lucky.pittman at murraystate.edu
Sat Jun 29 13:51:07 EDT 2002
At 01:36 PM 06/29/2002 -0400, you wrote:
>Hi all - A wild mulberry grows next to the house and I'd like to switch to
>a larger-fruiting variety. It's about 6" diameter (the tree, not the
>house) and I prune it hard to 10 ft for easy harvesting and to keep it off
>the house. I'd like to graft a named variety or two on it at 4 ft., but
>can't find anything about mulberries in the books I've looked at.
Bruce,
Mulberries are pretty simple to graft or bud.
If you have access to larger-fruited varieties right now, you could T-bud
multiple buds onto several branches, give them a couple of weeks to callus
in, and cut off the limbs above your bud placements and force them right
away. You'd get sufficient growth that they should harden off before
winter, and be 'ready to go' next spring - might even fruit next
year. Or, you could place your buds and leave them be, then prune back to
the highest one next spring, just before bud break.
Grafting with dormant scionwood works fairly well, too, anytime after the
bark starts to 'slip'. I usually use just a simple bark graft - behead the
limb(or seedling rootstock), make a vertical incision in the bark, make a
long, slanting cut in your scion - just as you would if you were going to
do a simple whip graft -, insert the slanted cut end of the scion into the
slit and slide it down until the top of your cut is even with the top of
the limb/stock. Wrap with budding rubbers & Parafilm. Voila! Success
rates should be pretty high, but you'll need to keep shoots from below the
graft rubbed off/pinched back.
Lucky Pittman
USDA Zone 6
Hopkinsville, KY
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