Root grafting

 This post is about my experimentation with root grafting of figs, mulberries, and apricots. In late February and early March of 2022 I had to root prune a number of my trees that were being migrated to a new orchard.  As a result, I had many root cuttings that were pretty healthy and I decided to experiment with using them as rootstocks.  I grafted the scions of figs, mulberries and apricots onto the corresponding root pieces.  Bellow are the pictures with the pieces of wood, roots, and the resulting plants.

Figs

Only two grafts were made, they both produced plants, and were planted in the new orchard just over 2 months after grafting.

The fig pictures below are from May 6, 2022

Mulberry 

The mulberries were grafted onto pieces of roots from a mature seedling mulberry. The following number of mulberries were grafted/ made to plants:

Buluklu 4/ 3

Easter Egg 1/ 0

Galicia 2/ 0

Isfahan 1/ 1

Tabriz 4/ 4

Taiwanese 2/ 2

Out of 14 root-grafted cuttings, I got 10 plants that were ready to be field-planted in 2 months.

Below are the pictures of the roots, scions, and the freshly grafted material.

It seems that the cleft grafts worked better than bark grafts, but the numbers are too low for any particular cultivar to make any conclusions on the best type of graft to use for the root grafting.

The pictures below are from the field planting of Tabriz and Taiwanese plants.  Grafted on February 26 and planted on May 6, 2022.

Tabriz

Taiwanese

Apricots

On March 1, 2022 the apricot scions were grafted onto the pieces of roots from mature apricot seedling. The following number of scions were grafted/ made to plants:

Aura's Mystery 2/ 1

Shekar Pareh  1/ 1

Waught 1/ 0

Peixote Blenheim - 1/ 1

Moniqui - 1/ 1

Hassan Krasnyi - 1/ 0

Altair 4 - 1/ 1

Ram Rock - 1/ 0

Routers Peach - 1/ 0

In total, 10 root pieces were grafted and 5 became successful plants.

Here are the pictures of the combinations that later became new plants:

And below are the combinations that failed.

From the above pictures, I do not see any correlations between the root piece size, amount of feeder roots, etc and the fate of the graft.  The failures are most likely due to inefficient connections between the stem and root cambial layers.

Below are a couple of successful plants that were field planted on May 13, 2022.

Check our sales site if we have the cuttings available reallygoodplants.com

Mulberries in May of 2021

This year we started picking mulberries already in April. The first cultivar to produce was Himalayan DMOR9, the longest berry in the picture below. Here I have (left to right): Pakistan, Oscar, Maple Leaf, Himalayan DMOR9, Pakistan White, Big leaf FL

Himalayan DMOR9 is an excellent mulberry with very high sugar and some acid, a few more pictures below 

The tree is large and vigorous. The cuttings do not root and the propagation is by grafting mostly. I didn’t try the air layering yet, this might work too. The leaves are slightly lobed.

Pakistan  White (Saharanpur Local, Australian Green) produces extremely sweet long white mulberries. No acid in these fruits and they can be consumed even when not fully ripe. The tree is very vigorous. The cuttings do not root and should be grafted.

Oscar is a relatively common cultivar with sweet- sour fruits. They need to be fully ripe to be enjoyable. Just a standard good dark fruit without anything special in it. Large tree that needs pruning every season.  Oscar dormant cuttings can be rooted. Below are the Oscar fruits along  a few Pakistan white fruits.

In two images below I show how Oscar compares to Maple Leaf mulberry fruits. Oscar is on the left in both images.

Maple Leaf is an excellent mulberry and deserves a better distribution. The fruits are long, some can be as long as the smaller Pakistan mulberries. Very sweet with a little acid. The tree is large. It seems it can be rooted from dormant cuttings. The images are above along with Oscar fruits. In the below image, Maple Leaf is the rightmost fruit. Left to right here are Himalayan DMOR9, Pakistan, Oscar, and Maple Leaf.

Buluklu mulberry just started ripening in the end of May. The large tree produces a lot of sweet very juicy fruit without any acidity. I like them very much. This type of the fruit is very common in Central Asia and Turkey.

In the image below, all short white fruits are Buluklu.

Big Leaf FL is the code name for the mulberry that came nameless from Florida. The fruits are relatively large, black, sweet-sour and need to be completely ripe to be enjoyable. The leaves are very large on this tree. In the image above, these fruits are on top of the Buluklu fruits in the container on the right.

More pictures below.

Pakistan is a very good large fruit with a balance of sweet and sour, more on the sweet side. It’s not as intense as the Himalayan DMOR9 however. Here is how it compares to Illinois Everbearing in the picture below. This is a large tree, needs yearly pruning. The dormant cuttings can be rooted.

Illinois Everbearing is just starting to ripen the very first fruits. It’s a later ripening cultivar. The fruits are small, sweet-sour and need to be fully ripe to be enjoyable. The fruits are in the picture above on the right. The tree is large, the cuttings do not root and should be grafted.

Black Prince doesn’t normally fruit in May, but I have a grafted tree in a 10 gallon pot by the Southern wall in my backyard and it produces now. The fruits on my in ground tree are not ready yet. These are excellent, very sweet with a little acid. The fruit size from this potted tree is smaller than the ones from the in ground tree. 

The fruits have a lighter middle core.

I should move this tree to a large pot of I want to keep it in my yard. Here is the tree:

Black Prince trees are large, and it seems that the cuttings can be rooted.

Material availability.  Many of these can be found as cuttings at the winter exchanges organized by the CRFG chapters.  If I have material for sale, I post it at reallygoodplants.com 

 

Do mulberries root?

Update on 2/17/2024

Himalayan Naples can be rooted at least in the cloner. I see a well-developed root on one of two cuttings placed in the cloner about a month ago.

More info in this video:

https://youtube.com/shorts/-oJxlN-IFu0?si=PitPIwqaHic5NMps

Update on 1/4/2024

Himalayan Skinner Mulberry can root pretty efficiently in a cloner, at least from the thin green cuttings taken in December. Here I have a picture and the video link of my results after 2.5 week in a cloner. Eight out of 11 cuttings formed the roots.

The video link to my YouTube Short:

https://youtube.com/shorts/i2H95AGsiNM?si=AIA0zNw1pQmwuW3L

Update on 12/10/23

1. All accessions with the “?” in the below table will root.

2. At least two people rooted Skinner using summer wood. I will stick the thin green cutting into the cloner today and will report back the results.

Update on 12/9/21 with more data I have by now:

The info below was originally published on 1/1/21.

This is a summary of my personal experience with rooting different mulberry cultivars.

Cuttings from these cultivars are occasionally available at reallygoodplants.com

World's Best mulberry

 The tree seems to be small, but I only have 2 seasons of experience with it in the ground. It fruits all summer long, making it similar in the fruiting pattern to the 4 seasons mulberry. However, the fruits are smaller and not as complex as the 4 seasons mulberry, and they are less juicy. They should have a better shelf life than the 4 seasons.  The fruits have longer petioles than the 4 seasons,  and they separate from the shoots easier with less mess.  The shoots are straight and a little thicker than the 4 seasons mulberry shoots. They root easily from cuttings.