Sealing your scion wood

[chummer]

I had my first success last year to. I got 4 out of 6 to take on rootstock. I want to try more grafting on to old trees but the few I have tried have eventually failed. If the birds, porky, or coons don’t break the grafts the bears probably will. I wondered if you were doing any on bigger trees and how they faired with the bears. I have some big native trees that produce very few or no apples I would like to graft over but I can’t bring myself to do anything but tinker with a branch or two. Maybe if my planted trees ever produce I will take some more chances with the native trees.

 

[Bowsnbucks]

Chummer - I haven't tried grafting anything onto bigger trees - only bench grafting to rootstocks. I doubt I'll try grafting to bigger trees.

Do your big native trees get plenty of sunlight ?? We have one at camp that was surrounded by pines, and when we cut some pines down to get sun to it, it put on gobs of blossoms and produced apples on it's own. All we did was put down some pelletized lime around it. The sunlight made the difference.

 

[chummer]

Chummer - I haven't tried grafting anything onto bigger trees - only bench grafting to rootstocks. I doubt I'll try grafting to bigger trees.

Do your big native trees get plenty of sunlight ?? We have one at camp that was surrounded by pines, and when we cut some pines down to get sun to it, it put on gobs of blossoms and produced apples on it's own. All we did was put down some pelletized lime around it. The sunlight made the difference.

Yes they have all been released and pampered for a few years now. On is a beautiful large tree all pruned up pretty. It gets a few blossoms a year and only a handful of apples, and it is a big tree. I have another 4-5 like that that get a few apples every other year. My best tree is loaded every year with golf ball size sweet apples that drop into November. That is the one I have four clones growing but I would like to switch over some of these other trees but don’t have the stones to do it. I keep hoping this year will be the year they get apples. It is hard to mess with something that has proven it can survive my winters when many trees have proven they can’t.

 

[Bowsnbucks]

^^^^ - We have a couple older apple trees that are 50+ years old. They bear crazy loads one year, and the next - only a few apples. I know some apple varieties tend to be biennial, bearing good crops every other year. I don't know if that can be changed by thinning some of the heavy crop year apples or not. Maybe some of the long-time apple experts can weigh in on altering biennial croppers.

I just watched a video from Penn State on pruning & training apple trees. It talks about pruning to renew old limbs and create new fruit spurs on older, mature trees. ( Which may or may not be 30 footers with heavy wood. Some of their examples looked to be 10 to 15 year-old trees with trunk diameters of around 6" ). I'll have to watch it again to digest more of the good info.

I've also watched some videos from U. VT., U. WVA., Cornell, and U. Mass. where they pruned some old trees to re-invigorate them. Some of the wood they took off was about 4" to 8" in diameter, but they left some upward-growing limbs / shoots to form new leaders with new scaffolds coming off them. The appearance of the finished trees looked much like the pics guys on here post when they graft several scions onto mature trees after they cut bigger limbs off to make the grafts. If your trees are really big and woody, those videos might show you a way to re-invigorate them. I just typed " Pruning Older Apple Trees" in my search bar and a batch of choices came up.