Hi. My name is Mike Pace.
I work for Utah State University extension in Utah.
Today I want to show you how to collect scionwood for grafting a fruit tree.
When we talk about grafting people say
"Ok, why do people want to graft fruit trees?"
There's a lot of different reasons.
Probably the most popular reason is they may have a tree that
they grew up with, they don't know the variety of so they can go and buy it,
but they do have access to the tree in their backyard,
so they want the exact tree.
Grafting is one of the ways you can do that.
When you look at grafting tree, what you are going to do
is you have to order your root stalk ahead of time.
Bring that in from a company that basically markets root stalk.
That's what you are gonna be grafting your scionwood.
Now the scion wood is the fruiting cultavar that you're going to be grafting,
and so that's going to be the apple, the pear variety.
What you are going to look for is last years growth.
You want last years growth because it's young, vegitative wood.
When you make those cuts into that,
what it's gonna do is it's gonna heal quickly
and that's what you want when you make those cuts.
This is an apple tree that I have right here.
Another thing to remember,
when you go to collect the scionwood that you are going to be grafting,
make sure that is not a plant protected variety.
Most plant protections go on those for about 20 years,
and so you want to make sure that it is not protected by law.
This particular one is not, so we can collect the scionwood from that.
We're looking at last years growth.
If I look on this tree right here, I made a heading cut here.
This is a little bit lower branch and I can see that basically
from my finger to my tip right here,
this is all last years growth.
That's what I want to collect.
The diameter that I'm looking for,
I want to try to match the diameter of the root stalk that I ordered,
and most root stalks will be anywhere from 3/16 to about 3/8 inch in diameter.
The most common one I like to use is quarter inch.
If I look at the diameter of this branch here
I can see that down toward the base I got some bigger material
and as I come up it's a little bit thinner.
This is what I want.
I'm just gonna come in and take that off of the tree right here.
I can see there is some other materials here I can come in and take off as well.
here's a couple of nice branches
that is kind of in that range I just mentioned.
When you collect your scionwood for grafting
you want to do it when the trees are dormant.
Here in Utah, typically we want to wait until the hard winter months are passed.
First part of February is when we can start collecting that.
Typically I will collect towards the end of Februrary, first part of March.
I don't want to keep this scionwood too long in my fridge
that I will use for grafting.
So this is what we are going to do.
than we are going to take this into our office
and we are going to take and cut it down into some smaller pieces.
Ok, so we've been outside,
we've collected our scionwood,
now what I want to show you is what to do with it
if we're not going to be able to graft with it right away.
What you want to do is once you're inside
is take and on this segment that we've got, we want to
cut off about the bottom 3 to 6 inches of that branch.
We also want to cut off the top part of the branch
because the top end here our buds are not mature,
so they are not good for grafting.
We are actually going to cut of a little bit more of that.
When you go to cut up your scionwood
what you're looking for, there's not a magical place you're gonna cut.
You are more or less going to want to cut
inbetween the nodes or the buds on there somewhere.
Anywhere along here.
Inbetween those you are just going to make those cuts.
Now, we have what we're going to use.
At this point, what we want to do is take a put these in
a solution of Clorox.
About 1 to 2% solution of Clorox bleach in water.
We're just gonna put them in there and let them sit in there
for a couple of minutes.
Then we are going to put them in a rinse solution.
The reason why we do that is because
we are trying to get rid of any bacteria on.
Once we put them in the fridge,
it will not continue to grow in there.
We will leave them in here.
Stir them around.
Make sure we got some on that.
Leave them there.
Now I'm going to take them out of the Clorox solution and water
and put them over into a rinse unit.
We'll let them sit there.
We'll set this off to the side.
Once we're finished there, what we're going to do
is take them and put them in
just on a paper towel.
We can take, if we want to,
if we got a group of them,
and just to help keep them organized a little bit better
we can take and put an elastic band around them
on the top and bottom end of them.
That'll keep them from shifting around a lot.
Now they are like this.
We'll just take and roll them in this paper towel.
Kind of fold the ends over.
The reason for the paper towel,
this can be paper towel, newspaper, it can be some sand.
Anything that's gonna hold some moisture.
What we don't want is this scionwood dries out
in the time we're holding it.
Once we have whatever we're gonna use we take and
put it in a ziplock bag.
We want to take and wet that
so we got a little bit of water in there.
We are gonna put some moisture in there.
We want it to be moist, but we don't want a lot of water in there
with that.
We are just gonna zip that up.
You probably want to label it,
so if you got multiple varieties of scionwood you've collected here.
We are just gonna put this is a Honeycrisp.
So we'll write on here ...
... what it is.
We may even want to put the date on there so if we do another collection
we can remember what the time was.
This one was collected 3/24/2015.
Once we collected that we go to put it in the fridge.
It's going to be better if we can use it as soon as possible.
We don't want to leave it in there for two and three months at a time.
By then you see it start to dry out
and some of it will just be not good.
If you can use it within about four to six weeks
from the time you collected it
that's going to be the best time frame to use that in.