5-IN-1 Fig Tree | Grafting & Re-Potting Techniques

My name is Charles Malki, biologist and plant expert with Ivory Organics, where we grow cool plants, and today we're going to be starting our grafting. Our goal is to do a five-in-one graft on this established fig tree that was installed in our garden about three years ago, so it's got a lot of root vigor, and we're going to take advantage of that to hopefully create some beautiful trees with the five-part fig tree and hopefully enjoy fruit as early as this summer. So be sure to stay tuned, make sure you subscribe down below so you don't miss out on these updates that we're going to bring you throughout spring, summer, and fall. What I have here in front of me are a variety of figs that were donated to me by Richard in Petalton, Oregon, and as you can see, there's different color strings that are around each of the plants. This one here is like a blue-green, I got a purple, and then we have the pink at the end, and these represent, as we labeled in one of our videos that we did a few months ago, the pink represents the hardy Chicago, the purple, the green, Isha, and the blue-green string is the petite Negri, and we're now going to be taking advantage of all of these successful cuttings and using them to graft onto our established rootstock. The first thing I want to share with you is the materials that I got here, and just a quick recap. We started off these cuttings in this sealed plastic bag with all of this sphagnum moss, and we learned in one of the videos in between that because it was sealed, and I've done this for many years successfully, but this year it rotted, and so we immediately pulled them out after about a week or two, I've observed that the branches were starting to rot, that we put them immediately into these cups of just perlite and vermiculite, and we put them in our window with some morning sun, and kept them hydrated with a few sprays of mist in the morning and in the evenings, and sometimes in the afternoons, until they finally got established, and as you can see here, if I pull one of these out, you'll see that there's a pretty good established root system here, and you can see the roots are even coming out here at the bottom, but take a look at all of these roots in between. So very healthy fig cuttings. Some of these will be used for grafting, others will be repotted, and I'll do a separate video on that, so be sure again to stay tuned. So we've got here these materials for grafting, we don't need this anymore other than to make sure we pick up the right fig at the right time for grafting, but I have here what's kind of like a parafilm plastic, this is not exactly parafilm, but we'll be using this possibly in our grafting today, I've got also some razor blades, as you can see here, I've got some rubbing alcohol, which I'll be using to sterilize my tools, which is very important for grafting, I've got some string, some fishing string over here, 10 pound test, you can use a little stronger string, you can also use twine as well, got some pruners, some scissors, some Reynolds wrap, plastic as well, and then I've got some napkins, and some more plastic. So those are the tools that I've got here with me today, and before we start, let me share with you a few more varieties of figs that we have, and these were some figs that I've collected over winter, are the Olympian fig, and you can see what the fruit look like over here, I've got over here the brown turkey fig, and I've also got the black mission fig, and lastly, I've got the kadota fig, and this is another fig, if you come around this way, we also discussed air layering, and I'll put a couple of those video links down below, but this is another fig that I did the air layer on back in the fall, and if we open it up here, you can see that I've got quite an extensive root system, and we're going to be using this as well for our grafting technique in this video, and you'll see how in just a minute. The first thing before we get started, I want to share with you is, take a look at the structure of this tree. So when we first installed this plant three years ago, it was a single stem that shot about 10 feet tall, we pruned it down to a foot, and you can see over here, this is still the original central leader of the tree, and you can see here in the center, it's kind of rotted out. What I'm going to be doing real quick while I've got you here, is I'm just going to take this product, Ivory Organic 3-in-1 Plant Guard, I'm just going to dip it here in the solution. It's an organic paint, and it's got seven natural oils to help keep insects out of that. So I'm going to make sure that that remains sealed, and let me share with you the product as well that I just used. And here's the can so you can see it. So it's Ivory Organic, it's a 3-in-1 plant guard, protection against damaging, sunburn and insects and rodents, for use on your roses, fruit, nut trees, ornamental trees and shrubs, non-toxic, environmentally safe and organic. The white label is now registered material for use in organic agriculture, the brown and green are still pending, and the product can be used as a brush on, depending on how much water you add, also as a foliar spray, as well as a tree paste. So I just want to point out that it's now February 22nd, and our fig trees are just waking up, and I wanted to point out that's the reason I started my grafting project this week, because by next week, some of these figs might start having leaves, and it's ideal with some of these grafting methods to start it before it actually begins its growth. If you come and zoom in a little closer, you can see here on the Olympian fig, for example, the buds are starting to swell, a little bit more so here on the Brown Turkey fig, if you take a look at the top, you can see that it looks like the first leaf is about ready to come out. Let's see if we can zoom in on it a little bit better, and you can see these are the first of what's going to be called the Breba crop of figs, that's the first crop, and then the second crop will come out of the new growth, and that'll be the main crop. And if we take a look over here at the Codota fig, you can see the same thing, it looks like the buds are just starting to swell, it's ready to start growing. So between this week and next week, we might actually be looking at a plant with some leaves. But I also want to show you near the bottom is what this grower did, and these figs were propagated by the Laverne Nursery here in California, and if you take a look, it looks like they coated their exposed surfaces with tar, and you can see the reason why is that the center part of the wood is very soft, and it collapses quite easily, and it's a wonderful entryway for wood-boring insects to get in there. So this is one example, and here's a second one as well, over here, and if you take a look here at the exposed surface, you'll see the same thing, they got it covered in tar, and then it's collapsed and it's working its way down there. And instead, again, you could be using something that's an organic product to help seal the wound, and it's got the added benefit of, again, the castor oil, the cinnamon oil, the clove oil, the cedarwood oil, the garlic oil, the peppermint oil, and the rosemary oil, all of which effectively repel insects from wanting to get anywhere near the plant. Anyways, let's get started, this is what we've done now. So what I did now is I took one of our Black Mission figs, which is right here, it's still in the container, and I've leaned it close to the branch that I'm wanting to graft. This here is considered the rootstock part of the plant, and originally, as you saw in the older videos, this was a green-producing fig, and the goal, again, is to create five branches, one, two, three, four, and five branches with five different flavors of fig, and we're going to enjoy this summer five different colors and five flavors of delicious figs that are known to produce wonderful figs, and the reason, again, that we're grafting this rootstock is this is a fig that's been passed down for about 30 years in our family and produces a good fig, but I'm wanting to basically get a, not a grafted, but a well-known. These figs that I've selected have been propagated for decades, some of them for over 100 years, to be known quality figs, and I'm wanting to bring that to myself and my family to enjoy. So what I have here is the Black Mission fig, and what we're going to do is we're going to use a grafting method called approach grafting, and what we're going to do is we're going to grow these two branches together and wait for them to heal, and the process takes, on average, about three weeks for those vascular tissues to basically be united between the black fig and the green fig, and then within another three weeks, so a total time of six to eight weeks, the actual callus tissues between the cambiums of the black fig and the green fig will have healed, and you can then separate the top of the green fig from the union and the bottom of the black fig to remove this plant, which is contributing the scion wood or the desired flavor wood onto what's going to become our rootstock. So let's get started. This is how we're going to begin. I have over here my tools, and again, the goal is we're going to use a razor blade like so. I'm going to make sure I've got it sterilized, so I'm just taking my cloth here, and I just put on it some rubbing alcohol, and we're just going to clean the tool like so, and now we're just going to make our cut into the rootstock side, and you can see here we've got, I'm trying to decide where I'm going to want to connect them. One of the cuts is going to go up the tree, and the other one is going to go down the tree, and what I've done here is I've aligned the two nodes, so this is going to be my starting point. You can see this line is the node where it was once a leaf, right there is the line of the node of the green rootstock. This here is the node of the black mission rootstock. So I've aligned those together, and what I'm going to do first is I'm going to cut down into the rootstock like so, and I'm going to continue cutting until I get about halfway into the stem. So we're going down, down, and down, and my goal here, if you can zoom in, and it's going to be a little tricky, but I don't want to break this down, but you can see that this is the bark, and then right under the bark is the green tissue, and the green tissue is the cambium tissue, and that's where the life of the tree is, is in that green cambium tissue, and then the center white part, if you can get in there, is the wood or the supporting structure of the tree. So the goal here with this graft is to make sure the two cambium tissues are touching, and if I can't get both of them, because you can see that the sides of these two stems are different, I just need to get one. If I just align it down the center, then I'll get no alignment with the cambium tissues. So here we go now. That went down, so now I'm going to do the same cut going up. So here we go, and the goal is to not go past halfway. I'm trying to get as close as I can to the middle without going past. That should be enough. And what we're going to do is we're now going to take these two together, trying to fit them in here, and we're going to press that down like so, and you can see what we've done here is we've got these two cambium tissues touching right in there, and this is going to be the union that's going to heal these two. Eventually, this backside will be removed, and the bottom of this will be removed, and this will become the new tree to support the black figs on top of the green rootstock. Let's tie this in place now. So I like using my fishing twine. I've been doing it like this for over 20 years, but you can use any other type of string that you choose. I just like seeing the graft because I do like to peek on it from time to time, whether it's once a week or every few weeks, until it actually heals, and I just like watching to see the heal underneath this twine. So I'm just going to wrap it a few times, and now I'm going to try to squeeze them as tight as I possibly can, and we'll just keep wrapping that all the way up, and then squeeze. So every few times I go around, I just tighten it up a little bit more. We're forcing these two to become one, and the great part about this is both of them are still alive. Even though I've injured it quite significantly, and you can see the white sap that's coming out of it, they're going to heal together. They're both getting resources from their roots individually, and they're both going to have leaves in the next week or two, and that's going to make their new sugars. You can see on the back side here, if you come around, as I tighten this, you'll notice as well that the back side is not as aligned, again, because of the difference in size, as well as we did on the other side. You can see the cambium tissues on the thicker stem is not in line with the thinner stem. But again, we only need one side of those cambium tissues to touch one another, and we're going to have a successful graft. So what most growers will do is take like a parafilm plastic, and what parafilm does is when you wrap it around the plant, is it sticks upon itself, you can stretch it quite a bit, and it removes any air pockets, it makes a very tight seal, and it sticks upon itself quite well. I would even maybe tie it with a rubber band at the end, but what it does is it traps all of that moisture within the plant, and you can see how well it sticks, but there's actually no glue or anything sticky in here. But what I've been doing for the last over 20 years, I've been doing this since I was in 7th grade successfully, is taking any damp paper, such as this paper napkin, and I'm just going to wet it, like so. And the goal here, again, is to keep the joint moist, and if that's what's so important in making sure your graft works, why not keep it moist with a moist paper towel, like so. And now, that's going to remain nice and cool, and damp. Then we're going to wrap it with our plastic material. Now we can use the parafilm that I've got here, I've got so much of it. You can also use a plastic bag, Reynolds wrap, anything to trap this moisture within the plant. So we'll just now wrap it like so, and then we'll get our twine here, and basically trap all that moisture in place, like so, and we'll just wrap that one more time. In the next three weeks, I might open it up just to make sure that there's no mold or rotting going on in here, but typically it doesn't, and I might want to change the dressing on and put another moist paper towel on it, and I should notice again in the next three to four weeks that it's going to be calloused over, and that the healing is beginning. What I'm also going to do, while I'm here, is take my pruners, right behind you. So what I'm going to do here as well is I'm going to take my pruners, and I'm already going to start training this plant to start nourishing my black fig. So this here is the green fig stem. I'm going to go up one or two nodes and basically prune it, like so. I usually go about a quarter inch above the node, and we'll remove that like so. That's already going to start training the plant to put more of its resources, more of the hormones and stuff, and the growth is going to go into this lower part, and I'm hoping it starts feeding into the desired scion wood, and eventually I'll be bringing this down, like I said, to the point of this graft, and we're going to remove that, and that'll be a video we'll be doing in the upcoming couple of months as we continue to watch the evolution of this grafted tree. I'm now going to be doing the same thing with all of the other five branches. Let me show you my air layer and how we're going to bring that in a little bit closer. Stay right here, and what I'm going to do with my air layer is I'm just going to take this fig over here, remove it from the parent plant, and we'll bring that a little closer to you so you can see what I've done. So this here is, again, the Kadota fig variety. We'll take off the label for now. Actually, I'll figure that out in a minute, but we can take a look here that what we have here is all of these roots, which, again, is going to be another approach style of grafting. We're going to use this living plant, this living tree, and graft it similarly to another branch like so. I'll continue to water this plant and watch it continue to grow alongside of the other stem until the two of them become one, and again, this will be another approach graft style of grafting. So that will be our next project, but what I'm going to do here is I'm going to clean this up a little bit. Wow, and take a look at these roots again, how they're working their way out of here. But I'm going to remove this additional stem as well, and I'm going to try to seal this a little bit better so it can better retain and hold water while it's hanging off the side of another branch. But you'll see the finished results in the next probably 20, 30, possibly 60 minutes until I wrap up all of these other four branches. So while I was waiting to set up our next workstation, I just finished a few more grafts. I just want to point out a couple more things, but in the meantime, we'll save our Black Mission fig right here in a moist napkin, and we'll save that for use later. In the meantime, let's take a look at a couple more grafts that we did. This one over here, we just did the Black Mission. The next one we have in pink, as you can see the pink string that's still down below, and we said pink is going to be our Heart of Chicago. I just grafted, I just wrapped it up, but I want you to see the graft before I wrap it in plastic. So if you take a look in here, get a nice look at how well those two parts have grafted with one another. Hopefully you can see that. And then I'm going to wrap that again to keep that moist, and I just finished just minutes ago our next graft, which is up here, and purple is our Green Isha fig, and you can see that we've grafted this onto that. So you can see the difference, actually, even in the color of the bark. This is a little bit more grayish on the right and a little bit more brownish on the left, and those two have been grafted. As you can see, there's a gap between the two on this side, but we've got a perfect union on the other side, and what we're going to do is, again, keep that moist by taking our napkin, we're going to wet that very well, and keep that union as moist as possible. And again, this is a technique I've been using for well over 20 years, since I was in the 7th grade. I've been grafting trees unsuccessfully since the 9th grade, or since I was, I guess, 14 or 15 years old. And that's done. Now we're going to take any plastic, I'm just going to use this here, you can use Reynolds Wrapper, a plastic bag, and we're just going to make sure that that moisture stays in there, like so. And we'll just wrap that in, and now let me just get my string, and I'm going to secure that in place. One point while I prepare this is the approach grafting technique, which we just did, is we've got two living plants on their rootstocks, still as the union is made. This approach can be done any time starting with the growing season, being the beginning of spring, or here we are on February 22nd, so before spring, but the plants are beginning to germinate, so I'd say as soon as you get out of your last chance of frost, you can begin it then, all the way through spring, summer, and even early fall. So this is a huge opportunity to be doing what's called the approach grafting technique, and my success rate with this is in the high 90s, I'd say 99 to 100%, there's no reason why this won't work. This plant is on its own rootstock, this is on its own rootstock, they're basically going to grow and expand into one another, and force a union between the two plants. The only reason it would not work is if they're not related enough, but here we are grafting figs, which are in the same species, the only difference being if they're green or brown or black, but they're related enough just as citrus, oranges, grapefruits, and oranges can be grafted with one another, and another example is with the stone fruit, such as cherries being grafted with peaches and plums, and another one that's related is the almond, so all three or four of those that I just named can be grafted with one another. So purple again, the green Isha fig is now grafted on top of this unknown variety of fig that again we've been passing down from family to family over the last 30 years, but what we're going to do now is we're going to prune to the next node on this fig as we did for the others, and this is going to come off, and we're also going to do the same over here on this one, and we're going to prune that down to the next node, so we're just leaving one or two nodes, again the goal is to encourage growth at a lower point to trick the plant into putting its resources into the grafted union, the selected scion wood, and so we're going to put those on a side, and then the last one I have left to go is this branch, which will be grafted with the brown turkey fig, so so far we've got the Black Mission fig, our pink is the Heart of Chicago fig, we're going to have our brown turkey on this branch, we're going to have purple, the green Isha on this branch, and then this one here is our Kadota fig variety, and so now we've created what's going to be our 5-in-1 fig tree. Let's go over and take a look at what's called cleft grafting now, this again being called approach grafting, and let's go and do a cleft graft, follow me. So here we are with our famous Kadota fig, and the reason I say famous is this one was featured in a lot of videos, we talked about cloning your plants and how to do an air layer using this plant, and we've successfully done so, as well as we've just used it for so many different projects, but let's assume that we don't like Kadota green figs and instead we're wanting to grow something like a Black Mission fig, and so what we're going to do is we're going to convert this green fig to a black fig. In addition, if you come a little closer you'll notice that this pot, the soil level is running a little bit low, if you were to simply add more potting soil, like let's say we're going to come here with our bag of potting soil and simply add a couple more inches of dirt, the risk is you're going to end up with something called stem rot. The soil is now going up the stem, the stem is not used to being out of the dirt, and instead the stem is supposed to be above ground and the roots are supposed to be below ground. Sounds obvious, but this mistake is done all of the time. So if you're wanting to reposition your plant in the pot, as we're going to do here today, I'm going to give you a few tips. The first thing, in regards to repotting your plants, with figs and especially in the first years of life, they're growing so rapidly you may need to do this process yearly, but ideally it's eventually going to land in a pot where this process only needs to be done once every three to five years. But if you're within that period of three to five years and you've exceeded five years, I recommend that you repot it, and the goal is to open the root system and give it just basically a fresh start within the pot, and you'll notice it's going to have a lot more vigor and better fruit production. You may compromise a little bit in the first year, but it's going to have a lot more healthier years ahead of it by doing a few of the tips that we're going to do right now. So again, this is going to be a grafted fig, but in the meantime we're going to quickly repot it as well, right back into the same pot, and let me show you how. What we're going to do is we're going to pull the fig out of the container, like so. We're going to want to get as much of that root ball as we can, so I'm just loosening it. If this was a straight container, it would have been a lot easier to pull it out, but I'm going to have to loosen it to get it out of its container, and here it comes. So we've got this entire mass of this root ball, and what we're going to do is clean this up and give it another fresh start. What I have here to my left are some broken pieces of clay pots, and what I'm going to do is break these down into smaller pieces, like so. The goal with the container is, unfortunately this one only has one escape route for water, and the goal is to make sure that you have sufficient drainage, otherwise you're going to deal with a phenomenon known as root rot. But what we're going to do here is we're going to make sure that hole is open and exposed, and to make sure it doesn't get blocked is we're going to put some of these clay pieces right here at the bottom of the container, if you want to take a quick look. We're just basically going to take these pieces, and the hole is on this side right over here. We're just going to basically put a few of these pieces around it, and that's just going to help with drainage and make sure that the water gets out faster and slower. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to take some of our potting mix. This here is our potting soil, and this here is a product made by Kellogg's, Patio Plus. It's got a lot of these white flakes in it, and these white flakes in here are known as perlite. It's this product over here. Perlite, as you can see, improves drainage, aeration, and potting mixes. What I like to do is to take my potting soil, and especially at the bottom, take a couple handfuls of my potting mix and add a couple extra scoops of perlite to help with drainage, especially near the bottom and at the top. If you take a look in here, we've got our perlite and potting mix, and we're just doing that to basically make sure that we have sufficient drainage, especially when the water gets near the bottom. We don't want it to collect and drown the roots. We've got here our fig tree. One of the issues with figs, and let me show you another plant that I've got here on my left. This here I pulled out from another part of my garden. You can see this plant's been neglected, and it's been sitting near the ground, and the roots are starting to escape the plant. You can imagine near the base of this plant, the roots are coiled, and they're wrapping upon one another. It's important to also make sure that these roots get a fresh start within the container. Again, it's not a process you do every year. It should be done every three to five years on average, again, to give your figs and any of your other fruit trees a fresh start in its container. What we'll do here, and again, this is a tree that's going into a friend's yard, so I'm not going to mess with it, but this is a fig that we're going to enjoy in our backyard, and we're using this container to do so. We're going to correct this plant right now, as it's been in this container for a couple of years now. What we're going to do is we're just going to go with our pruners like so, and we're going to clean this whole base of the fig, and you can see that I'm cutting out all of these fine roots. I would expect to see larger roots, but again, this is still a young fig. It's not as vigorous as the fig that's behind me here. We're just going to loosen it up, and again, we're keeping most of the soil intact, but it's just near the base that I'm trying to remove the roots to give it a fresh couple of inches of root-free zone to grow in. You can see all these additional roots we got out, and I'm going to keep the rest of the root, the soil and the root ball intact near the top. What we're going to do is continue adding more soil. We can use some of the potting mix from last year with some new potting mix as well, and we're going to enrich it now with some fertilizer, and again, we're going to do so organically. Here's a couple of products I got. One, again, being made by Kellogg's. Again, it says organic. It's derived. I'll read the ingredients back here with you. Derived from bone meal, dried poultry manure, feather meal, kelp meal, alfalfa meal. This is one product. Another one, Espoma, and derived from hydrolyzed feather meal, pasteurized poultry manure, bone meal, alfalfa meal, green sand, sulfate of potash, magnesium. So we've got two sources of organic. The third, I'm going to show you is Miracle-Gro, a non-organic product, and you can see what this looks like. I'm going to compare it to the other. You can see this is a glowing blue. It also comes in green and red colorations, but this here is a chemical source, and for those of you that say, what does it matter? What it matters to me is I want to make sure that my food is organic. I want to make sure that the fruits are being derived from organic sources. I'd rather my food being derived from feather meal and bone meal and blood meal and not derived out of some chemical factory. Miracle-Gro does have an organic line, so nothing against Miracle-Gro, but when you do pick it up, do look for those ingredients that say feather meal, bone meal, blood meal, and organic sources for getting the nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium, as well as the micronutrients that plants need to succeed. So here we are with our mixture. As you can see, we filled up the pot about one-third of the way, and what we're going to do next is we're going to add some organic fertilizer to the bottom as well as the top. Without even looking at the ingredients, I'm just adding a little bit at this point. As you can see, the plant is, again, it's February 22nd. We're almost a month since our freeze has passed here in Los Angeles, California, but we can see, if you take a look a little closer, that the plant is just getting ready to grow. If you take a look real closely, you can see the buds are swelling over here, and near the top, you can see that there's also some green that's just starting. So we're going to remember this year after year as February 22nd being, you know, it's this week that our figs are coming to life here in Los Angeles. What we're going to do next is add some organic fertilizer, and I've probably added no more than a quarter of a cup. Even though the instructions might require more, I'm going to add more as the weather begins to warm up. Now we're going to reinstall our fig. So take a look at those roots as they're hanging. I'm hoping you can capture that. The roots are longer than the pot. It's touching the ground here, and that's got to be at least three feet off the ground, and that pot is only two. So we're going to continue pruning those excess roots out. That was a good point, and I hope you captured that in the video. We're just going to cut all of that extra length off the fig so that when it's in the pot, it's only going to grow down into the solution. You can see there's a little bit more that can be cut on that side, and now we're good. Take a look at that, and that'll go into the container like so. Make sure you get the height right. We're going to want to leave about an inch near the top so you can add some water and mulch if you decide to mulch your trees, and we'll now backfill the soil. And again, we're using a lot of last year's potting mix. No big deal, as we're going to enrich it further with some organic matter in just a minute. We're going to reposition the height again. Some fresh potting mix as well. And now I'm going in with my fingers. I'm pressing out any possible air pockets that may exist around the root ball as that can possibly dry out the root and cause harm to the plant. And we're going to want to come back, and you're going to see here that we're right where we started before. This is where it was in the ground before, and we're at the same place now. We haven't added not even a quarter inch of additional soil over the stem. We're keeping the stem in exactly the same place and the roots right where they need to be, and we're a little bit higher in the pot now than where we used to be before. What we're going to do next is continue to enrich the soil a little further, so we're going to add some more organic material. And as you can see, if you come a little closer, I've added no more than about a quarter of an inch. We'll mix that in a little bit with the surface to make sure the soil and the soil microorganisms are in contact with the fertilizer to help break it down and get those nutrients to the plant. And we'll just water that down. So that would conclude potting a fig tree. For demonstration purposes, and again, I love my Codota fig, but for the sake of demonstration purposes, I'm going to show you how to now graft the Codota fig into what's going to become a Black Mission fig. So here we go. I'll take off my gloves as we're going to do things a lot more sterile now. And let me get out of this mess. I'm going to scoot up a couple feet forward, so I'm just going to move the station back. So we're going to take a quick break, and we'll continue in just a minute. So here we are now. We've just repotted the fig. We've enriched the potting mix with a lot more organic matter so that it'll continue to feed the plant. And we're going to continue feeding the plant every spring, summer, and fall. So for these next three seasons, we're going to use a granular fertilizer, which lasts within the soil for a couple of months to three months compared to a liquid feed, which we may use in between. By just cutting back on the granular feed, we can fill in these gaps with a liquid feed. What we're going to do next is graft the plant. And what we're going to do is we're going to take the height, and again, this was about twice as tall before we did the air layer. And again, you saw that it was growing from a couple of these nodes. So it's the beginning of its growth, and the fluids are beginning to move through the plant, so it's a race to do what's called the cleft graft. And what we're going to do is we're going to cut this down, all the way down to near the base of the tree. And this is how most growers graft their trees, is they basically use the root stock, and they keep just a few inches off the ground, and then they graft it with the selected variety. But you could just as easily graft at any other point along the length. But I'm going to bring it down to, and what I'm looking for, if you come in a little closer before I make the cut, what I'm looking for is where there's a good space between the nodes. As you can see over here from this point down, the nodes are quite close to each other. This is one node, another node, another node, another node, another node, another node. Whereas as we get past this point, there's a little bit more space between the nodes. And when cutting through the plant for the purpose of the graft, you can see that the nodes are a little bit more spaced above this point than it is below this point. So I'm going to use this space between the nodes as my grafting spot. And what I'm going to do now is just make the cut a quarter inch below the node. And here we go. And again, the reason I went below the node is the node is typically an obstacle when cutting through it, and you'll see what I'm talking about when I come through with my razor. And what I'm going to do next is I'm going to take my razor here, and again we're going to come with our cloth. I'm going to add some rubbing alcohol to it as well to sterilize my blade, cleaning my fingers as well. And what we're going to do now is basically saw back and forth about a half an inch to an inch down into the tree. And so here we go. Right through the middle, and we're just going to rock our blade back and forth until we basically open it about a half an inch down. And we've accomplished that like so. That's it. What we're going to do next is I've got now two cuttings. This here is our black mission fig, which I'm going to take my dish over here. And what we're going to do here is we're going to take our black mission fig over here, and we're now going to prepare it. Because I've got so much room between, I'm actually going to use, and I'm hoping to fit two scionwoods, which are desired flavor to fig. This one here being is the brown turkey, and the one on my left, the longer one, is the black mission. So we're going to graft these two varieties on either side of that cut that we made into the rootstock. So here we go. What I'm going to do is we'll start off with the brown turkey. And we're going to simply shave along the side. And as we discussed earlier, the center is the wood, the supporting structure of the plant. Right underneath the bark is the green line or cambium tissues. And now we're just going to do the same on the other side. And we're going to create a nice V structure, and we're going to want to make sure that's even. There we go on that side. Do the same thing again on this side. And I like to taper the end as well. And here we go, just like that. Take a look at that. Now we're just going to insert it. The longer end, as you can see, I tapered it. The longer end is going to go on the outside as it has more cambium tissues to line up with the cambium tissues that are going to line up with the rootstock. So here we go. So here we are now. I'm going to take my screwdriver. We're going to insert that here into the rootstock to basically separate the cut that we made. And if you come around this way, you'll see that I've now got a gap for putting in my scion wood, selected flavor of fig. And that's going to go right in there, like so. And hopefully as much as possible, those cambium green layer tissues that are right underneath the bark between the rootstock and the selected scion wood are in contact. So we just did one. And look at how much space I've got now between this side and this side. And that's the reason I decided to do two flavors. And I figured that's going to be interesting once both of these take, that I've got now a two-in-one flavored fig tree growing on the same rootstock. So now let's take the, now let's take our black mission fig. And what I'm going to do now is again, I'm looking for a good area where I can basically shave both sides into a wedge. And what I'm looking at is where I'm going to cut off at the node. So I'm going to either keep this node or that node, and I'm going to select this node over here. So I'm cutting right above the node, cutting that off. And let me clean my blade again one more time. And now we're going to cut away like so this side. And again, unfortunately I made that too short. So now I'm going to have to go up even higher. So here we go. I got to be a little more careful. I went too fast. So here we go. And I cut, and we're going to do the same thing on this side. Now, here we go one more time. And this was a lot harder because I'm working with a much smaller stem. But again, the point is the same, but a lot of cambium green tissues, which are again, right on either side of between the bark and the central wood. So right there is our cambium tissues that we can see. I'm going to cut this into a wedge. I'm going to pick one side over the other, and I'm going to side with that side. So I'm going to cut it this way. And let me sharpen that one more time. Down. And now let's put that wedge right in there. It's going to squeeze like so. And here it goes. I'm going to use my screwdriver again to give myself a little more space. I don't want to put too much stress on it. Pulling that apart. That goes down a little deeper. The other side is still in line. And now the goal is to simply tie these two together. So I'm taking again, my choice is fishing twine. You could use other string as well. I just enjoy again using fishing twine because I can kind of see through it and watch it heal better than other materials. And we're going to tie that up like so. And then we're just going to wrap it a few times and then tighten it after every third or fourth wrap. There we go. And now we're going to pull tight and then wrap. One, two, three, pull tight. One, two, three, pull tight. One, two, three, pull tight. And now we can secure that in place. Now, again, what 90 plus percent of growers will do is they'll wrap it with some parafilm plastic wrap. But my preference again is if the goal when it comes to grafting is to keep your graft moist, I like simply keeping it moist. We're going to use a napkin and simply wrap all of the wound with the napkin like so. We're just going to go with our napkin and basically all of the wounded area, we're now going to wrap and keep it moist while those cambium tissues callus and the rootstock and the scion wood, the upper wood become one vascular system. The roots will support the desired flavor of what's now going to be our grafted varieties, one being the black variety and the other the black mission. And now we can remember the black mission is the shorter one and the brown turkey is the taller one of the two grafts that we have here. So unlike the approach graft where we just wrapped the wound, when it comes to doing the cleft graft, I like wrapping the entire plant. And so what I'm going to do here is just take my napkin and moist it and I'm going to wrap not just the wound but the entire plant. The goal is I want to keep the entire scion wood, the grafted wood that we just did moist and we're going to keep that alive while those vascular tissues heal. Then we're just going to take our plastic here and we're going to wrap the entire graft area like so. I'm just going to take my twine now and we're going to secure that plastic in place so that that moisture stays there for the next few weeks while those plant tissues heal. And that concludes it. So typically within three weeks the vascular tissues between the rootstock and the scion wood will have created the vascular tissue to support the upper wood and so at that point it won't be necessary to continue keeping that moist paper towel in contact with it. I may change it at the three week mark but within six to eight weeks we can take this whole wrap off and just enjoy watching these trees continue to grow. If you've enjoyed this educational moment by Ivory Organics be sure to like it and most importantly by subscribing below you'll get to watch these plants grow as well as watch all of the other things that we do here in our garden. Thanks again for watching and happy gardening.