I recall reading you post and being as
puzzled by the situation as you are. I have little experience grafting (I’ve
had 2 failures and one success) but I can’t imagine why you can’t
find cambium tissue on your Sunrise
branch.
What I would do in your position is
nothing right now. I would wait until early spring and I would scrape on the
side of the branch about 3-4 inches above the original graft. I have found it
is easy to scrape (lightly) using the side of my Corona pruners to see if a branch is live or
not. There must be some live tissue there, though it is possible that much of
the branch is not alive as long as a strip of green (live cambium) stretches up
the length of the live tissue. You might have had poor grafting success where
most of the graft failed, but enough lived maybe a quarter of the
circumference, to keep the scion alive and growing. (I had something similar
happen on one of my unsuccessful attempts at grafting which eventually failed
altogether, but mine didn’t even last a full season)
Scott Hills
Michigan zone 6b
From: nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org
[mailto:nafex-bounces@lists.ibiblio.org] On
Behalf Of Steve
Sent: Friday, December 21, 2007
10:42 PM
To: North
American Fruit Explorers
Subject: Re: [NAFEX] My BIG
Question (Sunrise
apple)
OK, a whole week has gone by and I got not a single answer or even a comment.
Maybe I was right? Maybe it was so long that nobody actually read all the way
down to the question?
Or was it that what I described is impossible and (like me) nobody else here
has a clue how this could have happened?
sdw12986@aol.com wrote:
Why is this my BIG question?
1. This is the question I was pondering last spring that made me decide to join
this group.
2. It will probably end up so big that people will get bored and stop reading.
When I first joined this group, last spring, I introduced myself and
told about how I have 4 apple trees, 3 of which I grafted to multiple
cultivars. (I grow other fruits too but this is an apple question.)
Spring of 2000: I obtained 5 or 6 different apple scions and added those to
what I had growing on my apple trees at the time. I had high hopes for Mantet
and Red Baron so I grafted one branch on each of 3 trees with those two. Other
cultivars got one branch grafted. Then there was Sunrise. I ran out of prime locations so made
just one graft on a lower branch of one tree. It was a branch that I had originally expected to
prune off after the tree got bigger.
Summer 2006: It was a great year for apples that year and I got my first good
crop of Sunrise.
I loved it. I wished I had made 3 grafts of that one and only one or 2 of
Mantet and Red Baron. I would have to correct this.
Early spring 2007: I collected scion wood from my own branch of Sunrise and also from
Chestnut, which I liked well enough to add another branch somewhere. The scions
of Sunrise
looked dead. The cambium layer was brown. The Chestnut scions (and other apples
that I cut, just to compare the cambium) were all normal and green.
The winter had been an odd one. Temperatures in the 40s and some 50s right
through the middle of January followed by a sudden plunge into the -30s on
several occasions over the next 6 weeks. I figured that must be the end of my Sunrise. I cut several
more scions looking for some hint of green cambium. I stored them away, except
for 6 scions which I tested by placing them in a cup of water in the kitchen
window. Two of those showed a little life and opened some green bud tips. I
decided to go on with the grafts and try to save Sunrise from extinction in my yard.
Late spring 2007: I made 3 grafts with my questionable Sunrise scions, along with about 15 other
apple and pear grafts. I had 100% success with the pear and all the other apple
grafts but the Sunrise
grafts were completely dead.
Summer 2007: Now here's the weird part. I expected my Sunrise branch to be dead
since every scion cut and every pruning cut showed brown cambium and since the
scions didn't even try to grow. But no, it was just fine. It leafed out normally.
I expected that maybe it would collapse and die soon after leafing out but
again, no. The entire branch grew fine and healthy and produced another nice
crop of Sunrise
apples. (They ripened a full 3 weeks later than the year before and I wasn't as
thrilled by the quality, but I could say that about most of the other apples I
grow.)
So finally, the question. How can this be? How is it possible for me to find
brown cambium every where I looked and have the best of the scions prove to be
dead when I grafted them but then have the entire rest of the cultivar grow
happy and healthy anyway?
Steve in the Adirondacks
