Question about grafting a seedling to an established adult for faster fruiting

[JoshuaTilaranCR]

I have at my house a big Pitanga, nothing very special, the fruits are good but small. I also have a bunch of seedlings of Zill's dark. I was thinking of grafting them to the established plant to see if I could get them to flower and fruit faster and be able to select one to keep from there. How.much quicker would a seedling scion fruit on an established plant? Or is it not worth the hassle?

[pagnr]

There are mixed answers to this.
In some species  grafting seedling material to an established tree induces maturity and flowering.
In other species it doesn't work or has unreliable results.
Your best option is probably to graft the seedling material fairly low down and use the vigour of the established rootstock to push growth into the graft ahead by several years.

[brian]

Pitanga/surinam cherry fruits pretty quickly from seed, I would think you would just be setting it behind with the graft healing time. 

[JoshuaTilaranCR]

Thanks for the replies. I've always wondered if this would be true in breeding programs to try and get a seedling to bloom and fruit faster and be able to see quicker results.  I'll maybe try one graft from the fastest growing seedling and see what happens and report back.

[cassowary]

Luther Burbank and his team grafted selected seedlings onto mature tree's to reduce the time it takes for the seedling wood to fruit. That was for cherries and walnuts If I remember it right.

If I am not wrong his book can be found as a PDF on the internet.

[pagnr]

There are probably two possibilities.
Grafting a seedling scion onto a mature tree might induce flowering in the scion by plant hormone activity,
ie the activity of a flowering hormone coming from the mature tree, or the reduction of an inhibitor in the grafted scion.

You could also induce flowering and maturity by physical growth.
If a seedling grows 1 metre per year, grafting a scion from it, onto a mature rootstock tree might cause it to grow and much faster, say 2 or 3 metres per year.
The placement of the scion and cutting back the mature tree to force scion growth ( top working) can result in rapid growth.

[JoshuaTilaranCR]

Today is my day off from work and I'm going to try to graft at least one scion of the pitanga onto my mature plant, maybe two. It'll let me do two things, one is trim the seedling because it's going straight up with no branching. And two, see if I can get it to flower faster. My big Pitanga is just starting to flower now and flowers heavily these next few months.