Grafting Fruit Trees Made Simple !

Grafting fruit trees always seem like a daunting task to me and despite reading a lot of books on "how to" but without actually seeing how they are done in real life, they seem very cumbersome.   Fortunately, my cousin Sue Jane was willing to offer me a quick lesson in this fascinating process today.  Her friend, Ming Wei Shen who has been grafting all  kinds of fruit trees successfully for many years was also there to show me the easy way to do this daunting job. Thanks to Sue-Jane, she was kind enough to allow me to video tape her simple method.

Basically, she said, it is  very simple if you do it right the first time. All you need are the following:

You have to have three simple tools: (pictures of these are shown in the video as well as photos attached)

1. A roll of parafilm paper, those that are used in any clinical laboratories.
2. A sharp knife (one side flat and the other side slanted for cutting)
3. Rubber strips or bands (these are made out of discarded bicycle inner tires and cut into strips yourself)

Parafilm paper is used to seal and preserve moisture of the branch. After you selected the branches, you wrap them up and refrigerate them until you are ready to graft .

A very sharp knife of course, is to cut the branch into a wedge shape and to cut a slit in the main tree trunk so that the newly wedged shape branch could be inserted and attached onto the main tree trunk, tightly wrapped and sealed by the parafilm paper strip.

The Rubber band act as a second sealer of protection and  to keep the grafted branch very tight with the tree trunk so that no moisture can escape. It also helps to tightly bond the new growth with the existing main trunk growth in spring time.

Of course, the grafting should be done with similar species of fruit trees and also the process should be done when the trees are dormant. 

The total process took about 15 minutes. Important note: the freshly cut wedge must be aligned with the other main branch so that the cellular growth can proceed successfully.

Selected branches for grafting

LINK+IMAGE

Parafilm roll

Parafilm roll

Removing the parafilm paper from roll, cut into     about 1" wide strips. Then pull the strip to stretch the length of the parafilm until they are about one foot in length for wrapping. See pictures on video.

Enjoy the pictures and video. Excuse the background noise, I did it in a non controlled environment.