North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Jwlehman@aol.com]

In a message dated 5/29/2005 5:43:25 PM US Eastern Standard Time, lonrom@hevanet.com writes:

> One other thing that can help - leave a few "nurse" limbs near the 
> graft if possible.  It seems to help draw energy to the grafts.  Cut 
> the nurse limbs off in the winter after the grafts go, though.



Lon Rombough

Hello all,
My experiences grafting persimmon differ form Lon's. I've been doing both, with and w/o nurse limbs for many years. My conclusion is nurse limbs can defer nutrition from the graft to the nurse limb. Last year I grafted about 8 trees 4 to 6 inches in diameter and about half with nurse limbs. There was on the average considerably less growth on the trees with nurse limbs. 

Jerry