Author Topic: How to prune rootstocks with more than one stem before grafting  (Read 947 times)

Jose Spain

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Hi everyone,

I bought yesterday my rootstocks to graft, all of them Gomera 3. Most have just one stem, but 3 of them have already spread and have  3/4 branches. They are just around 20 inches high. So my doubt is, given that they will be grafted in one month, should I remove all the stems except the strongest one or should I leave all of them and graft them all?

Here the pics of the 3 rootstocks with more than one stem:

This one has already 3 stems, all of them pushing new flushes:



This one has 2 healthy stems and one tiny branch in the centre, at least this last one I really think that I should remove it:



And this one has 4 stems, but there is a stem stronger than the surrounding ones, so probably would be wise to let just the main one:



I'll deeply appreciate any advice/opinion from you!

Jose

simon_grow

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Re: How to prune rootstocks with more than one stem before grafting
« Reply #1 on: June 20, 2017, 07:02:05 PM »
If you have enough scions, I would keep all the branches and graft them all. Side veneers and cleft grafts work well for me. If you only have a few scion, graft as many branches as you can and then remove excess branches to divert energy into the newly grafted scions.

Simon

Jose Spain

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Re: How to prune rootstocks with more than one stem before grafting
« Reply #2 on: June 22, 2017, 12:06:41 PM »
If you have enough scions, I would keep all the branches and graft them all. Side veneers and cleft grafts work well for me. If you only have a few scion, graft as many branches as you can and then remove excess branches to divert energy into the newly grafted scions.

Simon

Thank you for the answer, Simon (and for the dozens of pages of great info that I already read from you in this forum). I can have as much scions as I can afford, the "only" problem being that I've never grafted mangoes and I've never received scions from your country, so I don't know how will go the shipment (mainly here in Spain) and what success rate can I expect from my inexperienced hands.  :P Obviously right now my main goal is to see the graftings succeed, so my doubt is if cutting some branches would increase the probability of success for the grafted ones (by diverting the energy of 3/4 branches to a single one). If there is not big difference, then I'll graft them all and cross fingers.  :) Probably I will try both ways and see what happens: graft all the branches in rootstocks with even ones and prune weaker ones in the rootstocks with uneven branches.