Duct Tape Grafting

Posted: September 21, 2008 by admin

In case you didn’t know, most large-fruited, temperate orchard fruit varieties, such as apples, pears and peaches are propagated by grafting. Many plant varieties are propagated by cuttings, which clones the plant, making a another plant genetically identical to the original. For some tree fruits, grafting is more efficient in making more of a given fruit tree variety than it would be to root cuttings. If you have rootstock sapling trees to graft onto, grafting can save the tree years of growth required before fruiting, as opposed to cuttings. Also, having the choice of any rootstock of the same species, one can select a particularly cold-hardy, disease-resistant or vigorous specimen as the rootstock. Rootstocks can either be seedling trees or clones themselves, that is, cuttings taken from a known rootstock variety tree of the same species. Grafting is often also more often a successful procedure than rooting a hardwood cutting. Grafting has been done for thousands of years and is even mentioned in the Bible!

Grafting basics

You are putting a piece of one tree onto another and getting them to heal together, the rootstock tree accepting the scion as its own tissue and eventually seemlessly supporting it with water and nutrients.

Materials used for grafting traditionally include something to hold the graft together, like string/twine and some substance to seal the graft wound from the elements (keeps the graft from drying out and protects from infections).

In my early teens, I started experimenting with grafting apple trees. I found some of the commercial methods more difficult to make work and I realized it took hard-earned experience to have success with shield bud grafting and scion grafting on small saplings. However, i found the cleft graft much easier to make work, so that’s the method I used ever since. We had a few random seedling apple trees a few feet tall around the farm, so I would graft my twigs from my Golden Delicious tree onto them.

Grafting with duct tape

A couple years ago, I had no money and thought, I wonder how duct tape would work for grafting? It would do an okay job of sealing from the elements and would hole the graft together for months. It achieves the goals of traditional grafting materials all-in-one. And it was sort of fun to use duct tape for yet another odd use (along with fixing shoes, sealing windows, etc.).

I’ve only tried about four by now, but every graft worked well. You can see one of them pictured below. From now on, I’ll just keep some duct tape on hand, for this and many other needs. I guess you really can do anything with duct tape!

Duct tape grafting, successful take.