Grafting Pears, Plums, Cherries, Apples, and Peaches With Poppy

Welcome back to the food forest. So we got Poppy here. Poppy's got his grafting shears and we're going to graft a bunch of stuff to apples. Things that you may not even know that you can graft to apples. We'll do a bunch of other grafts. Stick around, we'll teach you how to do it. This will be a great one. OK, so the first thing that you need is a source of wood. It's called scion wood and it's basically just a cutting from another tree. So let's go and get some pears, some cherries, some plums and I don't know, maybe some peaches. And we're going to stick it onto this really well established apple tree. So let's go get some scion wood. All right, so this here is my plum tree and we haven't pruned it yet, so we're going to actually take out some of the stuff that we're going to cut out anyways. Inward growing branches. We're going to save some of this stuff as scion pruning wood to graft. You definitely want to know what you're grafting. What we're doing here is we're going to try to get this right in the middle to get a good cut. And we're going to snap it off. And that's what we come to. So then we take this piece and put that to the side. So just so everyone knows where we are, this is the main food forest. We're doing it here purposefully so that anytime I film this area, you'll be able to check out the graphs and kind of monitor the progress, even if I'm not necessarily talking about them. OK, so what you want to do is you want to line up roughly the same diameter of the branches so that the fit is perfect. And then he's going to make another cut here. And so this is basically the same type of cut, but the opposite now will fit perfectly onto our scion. OK, so then we're going to take some grafting tape. Also, we kind of sliced off this bud here because we don't want the energy going into the bud of the apple tree and kind of bypassing the graft. We want the graft. We want the scion wood to get all the energy of the fruit tree. So we're going to start pre-wrapping some of this tape. OK, I'm going to set my camera up. OK, so then also just to note the direction of the bud growth. So the branch was like this and you want to make the graft cut so that the buds are, you know, continuing with the normal growth. You want it growing away from the center of the tree, essentially. And then you also don't want this is much too long of a graft. So we're going to also cut that off there. And this is what we'll graft here. OK, so this is 100 times easier with two people because one person can essentially hold the scion wood while the other person wraps. Now, this grafting tape is nonstick. It doesn't have adhesive on either side. And then what you want to do is take some electrical tape, something that's water resistant, and wrap it only on the grafting tape. And that'll just make sure that it holds through the season. Only onto the tape you put on, not onto the bark. Once the graft kind of has started to callus and heal over, then we don't need the tape anymore. It'll just be done. We don't want long term for this graft tape or the electrical tape to constrict the growth of the branch. So you are going to want to remove this probably after at least maybe two years or so. Now, we also made a cut here and this is an area for moisture loss. So what we'll also do maybe is tape up this end. Now, you can also use beeswax or something else for this as well. But we basically just we just don't want this to suck moisture out of the graft cut. So I'm a real dummy. I took the camera and then I took the cutting without turning it on. So we took a couple from here and then we took a couple from there. This is a sweet cherry and that is a sour cherry. We're going to put those all roughly in the same spot so that they can cross pollinate each other on the same tree. So now we're just going to take a bunch of scion cuttings from this. We're going to graft a bunch of them onto this tree and we'll do a little speed up hyperlapse video. And you guys can watch us do a whole bunch of grafts in super high speed. Alright, so we did probably about, I don't know, 20-30 grafts. And I'll show you what we did. We put some Asian pears onto this Bosque pear because it's a very good strong tree. And Bosque are alright but if I can make a little multi-graft experiment then I will. This is another Asian pear and then we put some Bartlett around here. I wanted to do a vertical segment here just to try it out to see if it'll, how it'll grow in a vertical way. So I wanted to try a vertical prune graft I mean. And then there is another Bartlett somewhere. Can't seem to see it. So we did four on that one. And then we did a whole bunch onto this apple. I've clearly got to prune quite a bit of it still. I want to get the height off of all the tops. This one is just a ton of work to prune. But we did a ton here. If I can just find them all. So there are a couple pears here. So we put some pears onto the apple. So you can do that. So that'll be fun to try. That's some cuttings from the Bosque. Then here are the plums. So we've got four plums. Two there. The other ones are somewhere. I'll have to find them. Here's some more. Plum there. Plum here. And I wanted to put it in areas that I walk. That way I'll remember to check on them. And then we've got cherry all down here. We've got a couple sweet cherry, a sour cherry. And then we've got another sweet and another sour there. And we did six total. And they're somewhere as well. So that is, oh and then, actually that's not all. I have a seedling peach here that I planted. And I don't know what kind of peach it's going to give me. So what I did is I grafted on one of my Reliance peaches here. So we did a Reliance there and a Reliance there. And then we can let a little of this grow. See how the seedling peaches are. With seedlings you kind of, who knows what you get. They're seedlings of a Reliance. So we'll see what we get. But we've got known variety cloned Reliance there if they don't work out. Well you can probably hear by the noise that we've got the pond up and running. So we started the pond. We've been cleaning up all the gardens. I leave my gardens all year because I want the plants to go through their full life cycle. I want insects that are trying to naturalize on my land. I want those to be able to overwinter and naturalize. Things like green lacewings and ladybugs and praying mantises. If you want those beneficials you have to leave plants up. So that they can actually overwinter on your land. We did a bunch of pruning on the pawpaws. Just cleaned out some inner growing stuff. Pawpaws don't need a ton of pruning. We've got another couple pawpaws here. There's another one there. There's another tiny one there.