Grafting to Wild Apple Trees

Yesterday I "top worked" some wild apple trees that had not produced any fruit. I cut the trees back rather severely last spring to promote sucker growth and used the cleft grafting technique to graft to the new growth. I waited until the leaves had begun to open to improve my chances for success.

After wrapping with parafilm I added a couple of wraps of masking tape just to made the graft more secure and put a covering of toilet bowl wax on the tip of the scion to keep it from drying out.

 With the large established root system of the older apple trees and if my grafting is successful the scion should be producing apples in a few years, much faster than grafting to rootstock and waiting for the tree to develop.