I want to share the experience of summer grafting of fruit trees. Conducted an experiment forcibly, when the trunk of an old apple tree with tasty, large fruits broke. It became clear that the tree would have to be cut. I put a backup under a broken branch, wrapped up a place for breaking, took up the study of literature on budding. 
Photo from the site: //dachavremya.ru
Duration of fruit tree vaccination
Oculation is carried out during the period of active sap flow:
- in early spring, when the buds only swell;
- in the middle of summer, during the period of pouring fruit.
Conditionally, the dates for summer tree grafting begin in mid-July and end in mid-August. It is advisable to choose a period when the wood is especially wet: 6-8 hours after heavy rain. A simple test will help to check the readiness of a tree: you need to cut a young twig with a sharp knife. If the bevel is wet, shiny, it is time to budding.
The timing of vaccination depends on the climate, in hot regions, fruit trees previously yield crops. The fruits begin to pour in the last decade of June. In areas of risky farming in June it is sometimes cool. When night temperatures drop to +10 degrees, fruit crops, berry plants slow down growth. Active sap flow begins only in August.
The benefits of vaccinations
Zoned cherries, apple trees, pears, plums in nurseries plant a frost-resistant wild game. Sometimes vaccinations are done to accelerate the ripening of fruits: if you plant late autumn varieties on an early ripening, you can get a crop by the beginning of autumn. I know people who planted shoots from tall varieties on bonsai.
The garden neighbor has a unique apple tree: more than 10 varieties are grafted on it. I can not decide on such an experiment. She went in for nursing in order to preserve her favorite apple variety. They are tasty, juicy, well stored.
Summer vaccination benefits
At first I wanted to cut the cuttings, put them in the refrigerator for spring vaccination. But when I began to look for information about the preservation of the scion, I realized how convenient it is to engage in budding in the summer.
Firstly, there is no need to think about preserving the cuttings. They are stored:
- At home, in the refrigerator, constantly monitoring humidity. With increased rotting is not excluded, with a low core it will dry out, the channels will become clogged. There will be no sense from such a scion, and the place in the refrigerator will be reduced.
- In the garden, in the snow. But then you need to close the cuttings from rodents. They are cleaned in a tin container, a piece of pipe or wrapped with barbed wire. It is important to find a suitable place for scions where a lot of snow is blowing. This is usually the leeward side of a house or structure.
I did not want to admit to contacting the cuttings. I decided to do a summer vaccination.
Summer is a period of bark growth, the apple tree quickly adapts to cuts. There will be no active gumming at the site of the scion.
Another plus - one-year shoots are suitable for cuttings, the distance between the buds is small, the bark is easily separated from the core, the wood is already dense. For spring vaccination, I would have to look for biennial shoots with growth buds.
The last and most important advantage of summer vaccinations is that the result is immediately visible. By autumn, new branches, leaves appear on the grafted shoot. The next year, full-fledged fruits are formed.
Methods of summer vaccinations
First about the instrument. I didn’t have a special knife. Used a cutter for cutting linoleum. Pre-treated the blade with chlorhexidine, so as not to introduce fungal spores into the wood, infection.
Any kind of budding consists of several sequential operations, you need:
- make an incision on the grafted shoot and rootstock branch into which the graft will be implanted;
- to attach the places of the cuts so that there are no gaps for gum detection;
- tightly squeeze both parts;
- wind the bark first with a cloth, then with a film;
- give time for growth.
For the experiment I used all three types of budding.
Pipe
I chose shoots for rootstock and scion centimeter diameter. I removed the bark from the stock in a circle so that I left a living kidney about 3 cm high. Then I made the same ring on the scion. Prepared bark from a broken apple tree wrapped a ring on a branch of a young tree Antonovka, this is the most fruiting and earliest variety in my area.
Tightly wrapped the bark with a raw belt from an old bathrobe, leaving a kidney, made a bandage from the top of the film so that the fabric would not dry out. She did the cut from the north side so that less sun would fall.
Cow bark
This vaccination was easier. I took all the leaves from the stalk, made an incision on the branch of Antonovka so as not to damage the flesh.
The cut wood was attached to the bare wood by a cut cut. She didn’t apply the bandage, pulled the incision with a soft wire, then covered it with garden var.
Vaccination in the butt
The method is somewhat reminiscent of the first two. Only you remove the bark not from the entire diameter of the branch, but only in the region of the kidney (young branch). You can implant such a scion on thick branches of a stock.
To preserve the variety, 15 cuttings were cut from a dying apple tree, five for each method. Not all scions took root, only eight. For a beginner, this result was considered excellent. The next year, Antonovka pleased her favorite apples. They ripened a little earlier, but were stored in the basement until the new year.
