On older wood i agree matching is better but its tricky on young growth hugging the trunk. They snap off during wrapping. But im having good success with offset cleft grafts on fresh growth. As far as the timing i double checked my texts. First bark grafts were may 8th! Not end of june. So shoots took 2.5 months.
Heres some picks.
Trunk had three branches. We lopped off all three and left one nurse lateral. Each trunk got 3 bark grafts. These 2 of 9 made it. Jan boyce.
Those were grafted may 8th. There was actually a third attempt on the nurse branch with matched sizes that all failed. That was the june 24th grafting. We then grafted these july 27th. Fuerte and hass
And sharwil
These were done middle of august. Scions from the successful jan boyce bark graft.
And just to complete the story heres a pick on july 15th of the soon to fail nurse branch grafts. The big shoot in the middle is 9 weeks old and grafted couple weeks later.