Do Grafting Tools Work? Complete Grafting Tool DIY

good evening growers it's thursday january 28th and it is freezing cold here on the southeastern coast of north carolina we are getting some of our coldest weather of the season right now so now is a great time to do some indoor work that i've been meaning to do for a while earlier in the year i posted a video on how to root fig cuttings and not all of the cuttings worked out for me one of the cuttings that failed for me is this cutting right here which is a very rare and expensive fig cutting called borgeso negra ramada which is a striped ramada fig and this cutting did not root for me at all but i just dug it out and i made a fresh clean cut and removed the node and it still looks like it's in pretty good shape and while some of it is dried up and not looking all that great it does have this little butt on top that i think is still viable and overall it still looks pretty good so i think this will be a great opportunity to make a grafting video if you've ever researched grafting tools before you'll know that the most common way and the age-old way of grafting is with a grafting knife but recently these grafting tools right here have become a pretty hot commodity and they have pretty mixed reviews now i've only ever grafted a fig tree once and i did use this tool and the graft was successful but i actually want to do a little review of these grafting tools and show hey do they actually work are they really any good because like i said i've only done this once before with these tools so let's give it a try and for grafting right here i have a rooted cutting of my chicago hardy uh fig tree that i decided to i rooted a couple of clones of it just to have as root stock in case i wanted to graft something over the winter and when you root you want the root stock to be roughly about the same diameter as the scion wood that's what this cutting is called right here it's called the scion wood and while this shoot right here does look a little bit thinner i think overall it will be a good pairing now for my money i always prefer to root fig cuttings over grafting them onto rootstock and the reason why is because i live in zone 8a it is possible that we could get a really bad winter and it could kill my fig trees down to the roots and if i were to graft scion wood onto all of this rootstock and a cold winter came and it killed all my fig trees down to the roots i'd be left with multiple copies of the root stock i would lose all of my scion wood so it's always beneficial for me to grow figs on their own roots however grafting can be advantageous because it can help us hedge our bets onto whether or not our cuttings will be successful because we can take little pieces of wood like this and graft it onto rootstock and also try to root the cutting at the same time so we kind of double our chances for success and because this cutting is probably about six weeks old at this point the chances of it rooting are slim i think i'll have a better chance at actually using this bud as scion would and having success with the graft because it looks pretty healthy so in order to be fair i'm going to try to do this whole video with this grafting tool and i should mention that i did spray this off with bleach beforehand so it has been cleaned and sanitized you don't want to make your cuts with dirty tools so what i'm going to try to do here is i'm going to try and get as close to the wood as possible when i make my cut right here so before i get any further i want to try and protect that bud because it looks pretty dried out it's pretty old so i'm going to take this roll of power film right here and i'm going to wrap up this bud and the reason why i'm doing this now is uh once i attach this to the rootstock it is going to be very hard to wrap because i might break it off if i pull on it too hard so that's why i want to do this now so i want to preserve what little humidity is left in there and that's what i've done now it might be a little bit hard to see how this grafting tool works but the way it works is this is the the razor right here this is the cutter this is a v-shaped cutter so when it comes out like this it presses and it makes a v-shaped cut into the wood so it's important that you flip it over when you do the the rootstock and the scion wood because they need to match up so if you make the scion wood into a downward v shape which we'll call the male end you need to reverse it so you cut the the root stock into a female end to accept the male end and i'll show you how to do that now this is going to be pretty hard to show but i actually want this to be the male end of the wood so i want i want this to point downward so it's important that i center this in to make the cut so if you can see in here this will give a v shape to the scion wood right here so i'm going to try my best so this right here is the wood that we are going to insert into the root stock and what is important here is that when you insert the wood the cambium layers of the rootstock and the cambium layer of the scion wood have to touch if at least one of the cambian layers doesn't touch then you are not going to have a successful graft and the cambium layer is the green layer inside the wood so it's it's this layer right here and because the cutting is kind of old it doesn't look all that green but i'll be able to show it better on the on the root stock so right here is our root stock and we want to make sure that the diameter of the root stock wood that we use is roughly identical to the diameter of the scion wood we don't want there to be a huge difference or else they may not mate up well so i'm going to make a cut right here and then remember our scion wood is like the male end so we need to reverse this for the root stock wood we need to we need to have it accept the male end so in order to do that i'm going to make the cut you have to line things up very well and now you can see what that looks like and the scion wood should fit pretty much perfectly in there so that looks like a very precise cut and again it is of critical importance that the cambian layer of the scion wood and the cambium layer of the rootstock match up and you can clearly see around the edge of the rootstock right up against the bark there is this green wood layer that is the new year's wood that wood needs to touch they need to make contact in order to accept the graft so we are going to be extremely careful that the cambium layers touch because if the cambium layers don't touch at least in one spot the graft will not take the entire graft doesn't have to touch but there has to be contact between cambium layers at some point now you can see here that the cambium layers on this side of the graft are touching perfectly and the other side of the graft doesn't look quite as good as this it's uh it's not touching perfectly but again we only need one side to line up and now that our graft is lined up we need to uh with firm pressure wrap that graft up and parafilm and you need to make sure that you are firm handed when wrapping this because this graft has to be held in place firmly or it will not take so you have to be pretty heavy-handed with uh the parafilm and if you don't have power film you can just use grafting tape all of these things are linked in my amazon storefront you just need to make sure that this is nice and tight to hold everything in place and you also want to make sure that this little tiny scion tip bud does not dry out because believe me when i tell you it doesn't take much for these little bits of wood to dry out so i'm checking this over and it looks like this v-notch is held in there very well so now i'm going to take a rubber band and this rubber band is going to add more pressure to the graft and hold it in place and you need to make sure that it's directly over those v-notches just to make sure it's holding it down in place with appropriate pressure and you again you want this pressure to be pretty firm now the last thing i'm going to do is i'm going to take my rootstock and i'm going to place it over by the rest of my cuttings i'm not going to put it on a heat mat or anything like that i'm going to put it in a semi-direct sunlight so i actually want a few hours of sunlight to kiss this uh rootstock every now and again because i want it to eventually encourage that bud to swell so if everything goes according to plan sitting in an indirectly sunny window like that in about maybe three weeks or so i'm hoping i'm going to start seeing some bud swell and if that bud up here starts swelling that is a good sign that my scion wood graft has taken to the root stock so we'll check in in a few weeks and we'll see what happens all right it's now february 13th and because i had this tree inside for so long it is starting to wake up very early so i have some buds that are forming here and here and these buds are actually in the root stock we don't want that to happen we don't want this tree to butt out because if it does it will siphon energy away from the graft so we want to actually pinch these buds off remove them we don't want the root stock to bud out because that's just wasted energy so i'm taking these three buds off and hopefully that will prevent leafing out here because if that were to leaf out here that would be bad news for the graft so now they've all been removed and will continue to wait to see life in the graft and here we are on thursday march 18th the bud started to swell a few weeks ago and now it has formed its first true leave and because we're doing this in the winter the metabolism of the plant is pretty slow so that's why it took so long but it appears to have been successful and i am two for two with this grafting tool so i am pretty happy to say that these grafting tools do in fact work and i think they are a really good tool for the novice grafter do i think that these grafting tools are going to be adopted by the old school grafting pros no i don't think they'll be well accepted with the old school grafting pros but for novices such as myself and for others that are interested in getting starting with grafting i do think they are a good solution to get your feet wet and learn how the process works because clearly they do work and in my two attempts i was successful both times just make sure that you get those cambium layers touching each other and then from there it's just simply an act of patience so everyone thank you so much for watching this video if you found it helpful please make sure to hit that like button and if you haven't already subscribed to the channel please subscribe for future updates and more videos like these again if you're curious about this grafting tool or any of the other products that i use in my garden they are all linked in my amazon storefront in the video description thank you all so much for watching and i hope to see all of you again on the next video somebody's sleeping um

Channel: The Millennial Gardener

Views: 90,147

Keywords: grafting tool, grafting tools, grafting fruit trees, grafting techniques, how to graft fruit trees, grafting, fruit trees, fruit, trees, fig, figs, grafting fig trees, grafting plants, graft technique, how to grafting, how to graft, plant grafting, best graft, rootstock grafting, rootstock, root stock, rootstock and scion, rootstocks, garden gadgets, gardening tools, scion wood, grafting machine, garden tool, diy, gardening, garden tips, organic gardening, The millennial gardener

Id: GJb5KBTouGw

Length: 12min 58sec (778 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 20 2021