Grafting Bonsai introduced

um we have the question to address today of grafting so we'll be covering that in a short video for you today hello everyone we're here on behalf of oscar yonker who is celebrating his 20th anniversary we just looked that up this is the the platinum anniversary so congratulations oscar we have the question to address today of grafting so we'll be covering that in a short video for you today we're using juniper as our example even though this is fall when we're doing this video and it is not the ideal time to graft juniper we want to graft juniper in the growing season the early part of it preferably in a temperate region maybe april through june so the plant should be growing a little bit but here i have a couple of short little videos for you that will splice together and uh the first part of this is shoot selection and then how to prepare the uh the scion um working with the little toy galway here just as an example so we trim off some of the some of the lower shoots to give us a little place where we can make our insertion cut choose a relatively strong shoot this i'm kind of exaggerating here with this one this is a really strong one but we're going to trim off this really long extension to give us a very fairly modest size thing we don't want too little foliage there we need it to provide enough food for the little cyan but we don't want it too big either because then it'll be too big a drain now there's a couple different tools you can use you can even use a razor blade actually everybody would naturally go for a grafting knife like i'm using right here but be sure that you know how to sharpen it because they're not the easiest things to sharpen and sometimes the razor blade actually has got the the better edge hair should leap off your arm when you rush across your arm that's the sharpness that you want so notice that i've made two cuts one long one try and get about an inch and then a short one on the other side um and that that's our prep so this is how we protect the shoot from drying out this is one option which is a parafilm type material this is called buddy tape and it sticks to itself and i found the easiest way to use this stuff is to kind of stretch it out as you go along and it creates a tiny little kind of greenhouse environment in there so the moisture cannot evaporate give it a little twist uh on either end the tip and the bottom there uh to seal it maybe check it really carefully so that you're sure there's no gaps and then once you've wrapped it um my my preferred schedule is then to cut it so uh this is the exacto blade example one long cut one short one and uh try and make it real clean don't redo it um uh or you can start it in a whole another area on the on the on the shoot if you're gonna redo it so now we come to the third and final phase of our grafting adventure which is to insert the sign into the stock and the stock is the plant that has the roots on it and the one that we're trying to to change with the grafting that we're doing we make a cut into the stock with our grafting knife or razor and then insert our prepared cyan and go for one side of the stock don't go for both you're only going to hit one because they're not going to be the same size so we're trying to line up the the cambium phloem there um and then we wrap with uh this is just nursery tape it's just a plastic tape it can be any color comes in clear and green uh give a light amount of pressure you want to close up all the gaps uh in the stock and cyan and then and then a light tie sometimes your your branch is a little thin so be careful you're not moving it around too much you don't want to damage the branch you're working on snug that up and then we cut that off and then the final thing that we need to do is to seal this because if water gets in there then we could end up with a failure you can put it in a greenhouse uh that can work as well this is just a latex sealer you can use any any latex sealer that would work fine so uh grafting is a way of improving our bone side there's two main ways of putting foliage on we won't talk about root grafting at the moment but foliage is so we can change over the clothes of the tree uh is one idea so that we change leggy foliage maybe to tight foliage for example or what we've done here is is to graft closer in on this uh plant that that has maybe gotten very leggy in other words no shoots arising on the interior of the plant and then once they have taken then you can cut off the leggy foliage or in the case of changing the clothes where you're changing the genetic of the tree to a different foliage then you cut off the original foliage so aftercare with this example when you're using buddy tape is fairly easy you don't have to leave the tree uh in a protected area you can put it out into the into the yard you you may wish for maybe a light amount of shade cloth because intense sun on on these can give some burn but it's easier to take care of than another method which is using a bag and the bag really does act like a greenhouse and they can heat up pretty significantly and kind of cook your your cyan so uh parafilm is super cheap buddy tape is a little little more it's quite a bit more expensive but uh but either those will work uh practice uh on a few scions before you and practice your cuts also yeah that's a tricky part um and uh and then uh once you've done some practice on a few sacrificial signs then you can move to your to your stock plant and do some grafting uh i wish all of you good luck with this i know this is a very quick uh primer um but it's a great way to improve your bonsai in many different ways actually so good luck to all of you cheers bye you

Channel: Bonsai Empire

Views: 59,671

Keywords: bonsai, Michael Hagedorn, grafting bonsai, scion grafting, grafting junipers, grafting pines

Id: c8ruqSm9EFo

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 07 2020