Hey everyone, do you ever purchase Trees at a nursery and wonder how it is that in season 1, they bear fruit, more often than not these are grafted trees, in the case of citrus and in particular lemons almost always this is done.
It greatly reduces the time to bear fruit from seed to fruiting maturity, this got me thinking...
Around a month ago I tried an experiment. To graft a branch from one of the apple trees in the orchard to a persimmon tree and vice versa. If you cut a branch off a tree and leave it on the ground within a few days this would be dry and dead, which leads me to believe my first two grafts have taken and worked. If I now scratch the bark off each of the grafted branches they still show signs of life and appear still to be green, very exciting indeed.
Here you can spot the distinct difference between branch colour and texture as well as leaves, naturally this is so as they are totally different tree species, whether they will successfully graft and integrate time shall tell, interesting it certainly promises to be!
I was now presented an opportunity, sure it will be super interesting having one tree bearing two different types of fruit, come summer we will know for sure, but what about one tree with two different flowers at once??
Naturally this idea came to me as we have bees and the more flowers one can have on or near your bees the better for the honey flow. We have bees on a site around 20 kms from here but no way to water our newly planted flowers daily, so what better way to get some branches off existing trees in this case the Cape Honey Suckle and graft it to the Bluegums at the property hence eliminating the need to water daily?? So this is what I did, and I feel it may just be a great success, but only time will tell.
I do not know too much behind the science of grafting and have also not researched it much, it is all just purely experimental, but a very interesting experiment indeed.
I simple cut a wedge on the end of the donor branch and a corresponding V shaped hole on the other branch, I get it to fit in as tightly as possible and then bind and fasten as tight as I can with insulation tape, hold thumbs and hope for the best.
Bees just love the Cape Honey Suckle as well as Bluegum flowers. I can only imagine if this works what the honey will taste like, time shall tell and I will keep you all posted, however if it works I will be doing this on a much larger scale as to supply my bees with massive volumes of permanently flowering trees all year round.
So far so good a great success from the outset. I have now grafted a total of 8 branches to 8 trees, this promises to be very interesting and I shall certainly keep you all in the loop.
Be sure to stay tuned for more of my epic bee-keeping and tree grafting adventures.
Have a lovely weekend.
Cheer$;)