Benchgraft anyone???

[Northmole]

I've been seeing a lot about "benchgraft" trees growing very fast. Does anyone have experience or opinions?
Thanks!!!

[appledude]

Benchgraft trees are newly grafted trees that don't even have one grow season behind them. Depending on the energy reserves of the rootstocks, they can grow anywhere from 3 inches in a season and others can grow a foot or two in one season. They are not magic, but you can sometimes get very unusual apples as benchgrafts compared to what a retail nursery will offer. That is because the person doing the benchgrafting has access to lots of different scion wood and he just whips one up for you and mails it. Newly grafted.

The downside to benchgrafts is that they are not immune to neglect, and just mailing them can present problems as mail handlers can be rough on boxes and envelopes. Benchgrafts depend for success on correct alignment of scion to rootstock, and if they mailman drop kicks it to your door, that alignment may be undone, resulting in a graft failure. Dry ground can also be hard on a newly planted graft. They just take more care than the usual nursery boughten tree.

[tkuntz]

They don't grow any faster than a chip grafted tree. The first season they grow slower...they usually catch up after the third leaf.

I've never seen any growth advantages (or disadvantages) with bench grafting.

A bench graft does take special care for the first few seasons to keep it healthy.

[applebiggy]

How long would it take to get a benchgraft apple tree to grow full size? We thought about planting some trees to keep our neighbors from seeing into our yard. i don't think apple trees grow fast enough to solve our problem.

[Drew Dubious]

How long would it take to get a benchgraft apple tree to grow full size? We thought about planting some trees to keep our neighbors from seeing into our yard. i don't think apple trees grow fast enough to solve our problem.

8 inches a year is optimal growth.

[appledude]

8 inches a year is optimal growth.

I wish my trees would be satisfied with 8 inches. On seedling and standard size rootstock on average, unfertilized ground, they can easily put on 2 or 3 feet per well-exposed branch. These are the trees that are bearing fruit well.

On poor soil, with M-7 rootstock, they average 6 inches per year, but are not vigorus enough to support much of a crop.

[Drew Dubious]

8 inches a year is optimal growth.

I wish my trees would be satisfied with 8 inches. On seedling and standard size rootstock on average, unfertilized ground, they can easily put on 2 or 3 feet per well-exposed branch. These are the trees that are bearing fruit well.

On poor soil, with M-7 rootstock, they average 6 inches per year, but are not vigorus enough to support much of a crop.

Yeh, mine have already gone around a foot... I even went light on the fert heheh. That is just what I have gathered information wise from several sources.

[mmi]

pine trees grow faster i think 6 years for a c tree. also populers are fast but have roots on top of soil

[Skipley]

"Benchgraft" refers to grafting not in-situ (ex-situ?) in the comfort of your home or propagation area. When I grafted my first 2000 trees-all bud-9 apples of >+100 varieties I whip and tongue grafted in January-February, put them in some warm moist bottom-heated sand, bundled together with their roots in baggies out in the cool 40 degree rainy atmosphere of Seattle, and voila! they were fused in 5 to 7 days, sometimes exuding callus tissue, sometimes breaking buds-those too near the heat. If you like to graft as I doi, thius system worked excellent where I needed to hold off on planting until June when my soil was finally prepared so I moved these back into the waxed boxes and packed them into a commercial fridge for many months. When planted out they grew like wild fire- some 5 feet whips-HERE in our cool 65 degree average weather! Awesome. The other 2000 I "FIELD GRAFTED" as opposed to bench with a chip bud in mid august. These lay dormant until the following year then they also grew the same-just a year later.
Anyone Chip bud in January-May???