Hi I'm Mike Pace and I work for Utah State University Extension Office
and I'm going to show you how to graft today
with a grafting tool.
This is what's called an Omega Grafting tool. There's a couple of different models
that are out on the market
this one is about a $75 piece it has a couple of interchangeable blades on it.
This one's a little bit cheaper. This will run you about $25 on the internet.
Both of them do basically the same thing if you're looking at doing larger
materials say a quarter inch, three eigths of an inch in diameter this orange tool--
grafting tool will do a little bit better job.
This one does a little bit better on the smaller diameter wood.
And so I'm going to use this black one because the materials that we're using.
Now, when it comes to grafting, what we're going to try and do, what we'd
like to do is we have our piece of root stalk here which is what we're grafting
our scion wood on to or the fruiting cultivar onto and what we'd like to
do is try to match up the size diameter
of the root stalk with the scion wood and you can see as I bring it up a little
bit towards the top here my scion wood is a little bit bigger than the root stalk
and as I move down here I can see
that I want to be grafting somewhere down here closer to match up those sizes
right here okay?
And so this is about where I want to do so I just take a mark that with my hand
with this tool what we're going to do is
just like a pair of pliers and we put it in there we try and make sure the cutting
blade is in the center of the material and I will then just squeeze down on it.
And as you can see that just pops that and it makes what is called an
omega grafting right there cut.
And you can see on this one that I did that I'm off center a little bit
If I want I can start a little bit higher on that and keep on doing it
for practicing. I'll just come down a little bit low and I want to make these
cuts if I can right in between a couple of different nodes on there and so I
just push that in there and again, now and you see that's a little
more centered in there.
I like-- when I make the cut I like to make the-- cut with what I call the
rabbit ears on the lower portion on the root stalk side of things
and I'm going to make the opposite cut on my scion wood and so
I've got the cut made on the root stalk now let's grab a piece of
scion wood and we'll make the opposite
cut and so we'll put that in. It's important that you
make the cuts
equally the same
and so if you're using the same tool you're going to make the same cuts
now what I like to do, it's just like a
puzzle piece. Now we're going to take and slide those two pieces together
and what I tell people is if you can take and line up at least half of this
grafting cut from top to bottom and if you can run your finger across it
and you can't feel a ridge there we've done a good job with that
and I'll just kind of show you you can see as I rotate that the fit is really good.
What we're trying to line up is if I pull that back apart I'm trying to line up the
cambium and the cambium is just right underneath the bark layer here
I'm trying to laying that up on both the wood stalk and the scion wood and I
only need a little piece of that to line
up, but if I can get one side completely done there I'll have a take on
this graft, and so that's what it looks like, I test fit it together.
Now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to pull that back apart
because I know I've got a good fit right there,
on our scion wood I want to leave two no more than three buds and so if
I look I go one, two, three
buds there,
I'm going to cut anything above that off
because I want this plant when it starts to grow,
I don't want it to focus a lot of energy on to putting out all those buds
and so, I've left three of them on here now what I'm going to do is I'm going
to take a dip it in a little bit of water, we're going to try and keep that
as moist as possible in there.
And slide those back together
again I
sometimes you'll see that your tool makes a little different cut that's
going to slide in there a little bit better for you
if I rub my finger across that that's nice and flush right there on this side.
Now we're ready to seal that graft union up
there's a couple different things that you can use
this is actually what's called a grafting tape and you can see it's kind of
like a piece of elastic, a wide rubber band.
What we're trying to do is secure this graft union but we're also trying to
seal it up and so to do it with a grafting band what we're going to do
is start down below that graft union and I just kind of pull it a little bit
tight and I'm going to roll that around that area and that's going
to seal it and secure that in place.
And once I'm done I'm just going to take and
pull that up and through.
And grafting bands you can get those through any of the different places online
I can give you a couple of different resources at the end of this video
that you can get those. And so with that grafting band that's what it would
look like when it's complete.
Now if you don't have grafting bands there's a couple of other products that
you can use. One of them is this paraffin tape
and it kind of looks like a small thing of saran wrap that you can use but what
it is, as you pull that you can see that it stretches and that will stretch around
that and keep that tight it will also seal it in
so I'm just going to take-- pop this off and kind of show you what this would
look like if we do it with the paraffin tape
I'm going to start with a new piece here, hasn't been expanded so
I'm going to go down below that start that get it caught
again I kind of pull that as I wrap that's going to secure that area in there
and then as I pull it, you can see that it pops off there.
And I've got a good seal with that.
Now, if you don't have either one of those products another thing that
you can use is just some black electrical tape.
If you're going to be using the black electrical tape to secure your graft
union there, what I like to do is I
will take a piece and I will cut it in half so I've got half the diameter
or half the width of a normal
sized piece of tape, and I will
kind of put that on first to kind of secure that area and so
just like we did with the other ones we're going to kind of
start a little bit down below that I kind of pull it tight, I wrap,
get that secured and then what I'll do is come back with a full width
piece of electrical tape and again start down below that, I kind of pull
it tight, I wrap, and I want that to kind of go up above and down below those
unions so that it's nice and tight and secured--
okay so we've got this graft union sealed and wrapped right now. Now what we
want to do is seal that top part of it because we've made that cut, we don't
want any of that moisture and nutrients to continue to wick up there and out the
end of it and dry this piece off that we just grafted onto there.
There's a couple of different things that we can use
this is one of the products that I use
it's called Doc Farwell's Seal when you actually open it up it's a nice
yellow and so what you're going to do is
just dab it on, you can see that we don't need a lot on that top all we're trying
to do is seal it, now if you don't have this type of product you can
just get some candle wax and heat that up and dip it in there, Elmer's Glue
any type of product like that that will seal that top portion up
and keep it from moving out so now at this point what we're going to do is take
our tree that we've just done here and we're going to put it in a baggie
and put it in a baggie with some moist material. This is just some
soil pep it can be pete moss, it can be anything that's going to help
keep our roots moist while this graft
union heals so I've got a little bit in the bag right now, I'm going to take
and put a little bit more in the bag to cover up the top part of the roots
we're not going to grow it in here but we're going to leave it in here
for the next 10-14 days and so I'm just covering those roots up with some more
moist pete moss, soil, in here
and now what I'm going to do is I'm going to take and seal that up
and I'm going to take and leave it in this bag with this
inside we want to keep it indoors where it's going be 60-70 degree
temperatures and we're going to leave it for the next 10-14 days.
After that, what those temperatures-- those are conducive temperatures
for the healing of this graft union right here.
Then we can take in put the materials out we can put them in some you know, a pot
like, typical pots that you buy at a nursery
you can actually take it out, put it into a
nurse-type bed in your gardening area and what you're going to want to do
is the first buds that are going to break is going to be the buds that are down
here on the root stalk
and as they start to break and start to grow we want to come in and
remove those off of the root stalk
side of that because we want this
plant to force all of its energy into healing this graft union and forcing
these buds up here on the new portion that we've added to this
fruit tree.
Over about the next 2 months what you'll see is that these buds up here on this
scion wood that we've grafted here will start to grow and overtime if you're using
the budding band or the grafting band or some of this paraffin tape that will
automatically fall off. If you've wrapped it with the black electrical tape
you're going to want to come in and just with the razor knife or an exacto knife
make a slit on a couple of sides of that
and don't peel it off. Just make the slits through it so that it will naturally come
off because otherwise if we leave that material on there it will actually
girdle that area and kill that new graft that we've just put onto our root stalk.
If you're going to put it in a black pot my advice would be is you can
grow it during the summer time and into the fall, it's a little more
difficult to keep it in here. I wouldn't try to over winter it in the pot, I would
put it in the ground come winter time
because most of the time what will happen is that freeze thaw action on
the roots you'll have a lot of root damage to that new tree and then possibly kill
your tree that you've worked on all summer long and having a success with.
You're not seeing that that graft did not take it's what we call a failure, one of
the examples is, for example if you're trying to graft apples you're going to
want to graft apples onto an apple root stalk.
If you're grafting pears you're going to want to graft it onto
a pear root stalk and so if you're trying to graft an apple onto a pear
root stalk that is not going to take
and you're going to have a failure there.
Some other things that might happen is, is that
when you go to graft you want to make sure that the buds on your scion wood
are pointed up. I've had people that I've taught that have come in here and placed
them upside down and obviously that is going to cause a failure there
This root, or excuse me this graft union for that first year is going
to be very fragile so you're going to want to make sure and protect that
and make sure that you know, it's not getting bumped or anything
like that because that could dislodge that those are kind of the typical things
that could cause that graft union not to
take and be a failure.