I am sure someone trained will be having a good laugh at my attempts!
This spring our Apricot and both Peaches failed to come into leaf, I blamed myself for overenthusiastic application of a vegetable based oil-wash but was told it could also have been "Fireblight"
Anyway the Apricot has re-sprouted above the graft so several branches have now been trained in, one Peach is re-growing from below the graft with peach leaves so its being left to see whether its worth keeping for fruit, the other is coming from below the graft with something that looks suspiciously like a plumb rootstock so I decided to graft onto the shoots bits from my sons peach, not sure how it will go, my previous grafts have been on apples but were to close to "Dog traffic" and although they "Took" got knocked off by passing dogs . So this time I have made the grafts longer with surface to surface contact and being in the tunnel at the back of the bed hope they will be safely out of harms way until the two parts are well bonded.
Hi Charlie and all...just wanted to comment that for me, plant propagation has had many successes over the years. The one glaring exception has been with grafting!
For me the need for fine motor skills, focussing on the finger dexterity, has been a definite disappointment. And I suspect that the passing years will not improve the results, sigh... So all the best wishes Charlie...may you do much better than me (somewhat less than 10% success rate). Understanding the matching of cambium layers, etc etc is all fine in theory...in actual practice getting the things to do what the diagram says was quite a different matter :roll:
Graft by charliepridham, on Flickr