Quote:
Originally Posted by Kostas
Out of curiosity,why do you prefer grafting on seedlings instead of just rooting branches from your source trees? Chestnut trees grow quite fast and you can take quite a few branch segments each year from which in turn,after rooting them,you can make even more plants! These would be clones of their source tree and non-grafted. The rooting phase takes some time but so does seed sprouting and seedling growth till grafting.
Grafting at a small age,as you do, makes for the best grafted plants btw and i am sure your costumers are happy with their trees from you!
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Chestnuts are extremely difficult to root from cuttings. I'm a member of the scientific organization ISHS and have read papers about it and know some of the people who have experimented with it and success rates of 10% or less is common. Right now I am working with a person who is a hobbyist at tissue culture but quite an expert at it. He has been trying to clone some cuttings of a favored rootstock which I would then graft onto later as this clone is proven to be resistant to root rot and also compatible with many of the clones I would like to graft to. Some of my most favorite varieties would have roots which would be much more susceptible to root rot. Anyways, even my expert friend is having quite a bit of trouble trying to get this clone established in tissue culture and we may need to start over with less IBA. For now, I have been using seedlings of the same cultivar which is fairly uniform, but still not proven to have the same resistance to root rot as the parent. Further, even these seedlings sometimes sucker quite a bit and I'm hoping tissue culture clones would avoid this. One of the problems with the seedlings is that sometimes nuts have multiple embryos so they actually send up more than one shoot when germinated and it's difficult or nearly impossible to separate them once the problem is recognized.
I hope to be offering chestnut trees for sale before long through a nursery I'm establishing and some of these trees will be grafted to two varieties as some of the finest eating varieties do not produce pollen and require a pollinator. Most hobbyists/homeowners would prefer to buy just one tree rather than two trees to get a crop.
By the way, I have a chestnut tree with one limb grafted to a clone that is a seedling from a chestnut which came from Crete. It showed great promise the first year or two but not so well since then, unfortunately.