hi i am thinking of having ago at grafting some apple and pear trees,does the rootstocks have to be a certain type of tree or can you use any tree? cheers
It certainly does, and particular clones are used to produce trees of different sizes. So if you want a full-sized apple tree you use M1, and if you want a very small bush you use M27, and so on. I'm not sure where you'd get these. I should have kept a note of what mine are on, as I have some trees which are growing as I want, and others that are doing nothing; I'm particularly dissatisfied with the pears.
thanks for the info mate if you rem what you used please could you let me know cheers
All the apples came on either MM106, which is the commonest, or M26. I think the latter is probably too dwarfing for my needs, but I can't remember for sure which is on which. The pears are on Quince A, which should produce a smallish tree rather than a bush, but they're not doing anything. I think the plums, which are a great success, are on St. Julien A, which should be a smallish tree, but the Cambridge Gage is growing at a rate of knots and looks set to become rather large. The Victoria is more sedate. I'm going to get more fruit; the allotment is going to become more of an orchard. It's 600 square yards, which is far more than I need for veg. Then I may well replace some of what I already have if the trees haven't sorted themselves out over the next couple of years.
cheers for that robert can you rem where you got the rootstock and the price
I bought the trees attached to the rootstocks - the problem is going to be obtaining the rootstocks for your own efforts. I wouldn't know where to start. Theyall came from local sources. Next time I'm going to buy from a specialist.
The difficulty with buying rootstocks for grafting for ones self is that the specialist nurseries which grow them normally only sell wholesale and orders are often a minimum of 1000 of any stock!
Now if you wanted to you could damage the root of an existing tree and if it then produced suckers, you could take off a rooted sucker and graft on to that. HOWEVER, the tree you damaged would then continue to produce suckers at that point so maybe the risk is a bit high. Might be interesting though. You would need a piece of the tree you wished to put on to your rootstock, but that is easy, any bit would give you the buds you needed.