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Larry Sagers Horticultural Specialist Utah State University Extension Service Thanksgiving Point Office © All Rights Reserved
To register for these and other classes, call 801-768-7443 or go online at thanksgivingpoint.com and click on garden classes.
BUDDING AND GRAFTING Larry Sagers Monday March 14 12:30-3:00 PM Cost $10.00
The ancient art of budding and grafting plants is the way modern fruit trees are propagated. Learn to save old varieties or share new varieties. Create trees with multiple varieties or propagate trees that withstand diseases, insects and nutrient problems. This class covers propagation of fruit and ornamentals through asexual propagation.
FRUIT TREE PRUNING Adrian Hinton Utah County Extension Agent Monday March 7 12:30-2:30 PM Cost $10.00
Neglected fruit trees are never productive. Learn how to prune like the growers to have strong, productive trees while still managing their size and shape. Do not neglect your trees for another season but get them in shape to enjoy the fruits of your labors.
Don’t look out in the garden now. Carbon-based life forms are now cloning other organisms even as we speak. Multiple organisms are being replicated by the thousand and one of them might be destined for your garden. If you want to see one or more of these clones, enter your local nursery and look around.
The replicates will be all around you. All of the fruit trees will be cloned and the blue spruces will be replicated, too. The roses are grafted onto a cold hardy, tough rootstock that will grow in almost any soil under wide variety of conditions. In fact almost all of the plants in the nursery except the annuals grown from seed are probably clones.
Cloning is neither new nor uncommon in spite of what many science fiction writers might have you believe. It is a practice that is neither high tech nor is it dangerous to clone plants. Cloning insures that the offspring are exact genetic duplicates of the parents rather than the variable offspring that results from cross pollination from seed.
To get high quality fruit that is consistently the same, the plants must be cloned. Although it somehow seems natural and appealing to eat an apple or peach and plant the seeds and wait for the fruit to come, there is a better way.
By propagating the trees vegetatively, the variety is an exact clone of the parent plant, making it possible to have millions of trees that are exact genetic duplicates. That is exactly what happens in many cases when new fruit varieties are discovered and propagated.
All of the Golden Delicious apples in the world had their start with one tree. The discovery of that tree is best described by Paul Stark, Sr. of Starks Brother Nursery, as quoted in their catalog:
"There, looming forth in the midst of small leafless barren trees, was one tree with rich green foliage as if it had been transplanted from the Garden of Eden. That tree's boughs were bending to the ground beneath a tremendous crop of great, glorious, glowing golden apples.
"I started for it on the run, a fear bothered me. Suppose it's just a Grimes Golden apple after all. I came closer and saw the apples were 50 percent larger than Grimes Golden. I picked one and bit into its crisp, tender, juice-laden flesh. Eureka! I had found it!"
Stark had traveled more than 1000 miles by train, buggy and horseback to find this tree. He bought the tree and took small twigs back to his Missouri nursery where he started to propagate them. This apple became one of the most popular in history.
Plants are propagated by budding and grafting for many reasons. These include variety selection, preserving old varieties, and size controlling rootstocks. Other reasons for grafting trees include placing multiple varieties on one tree, insect control, disease control or to repair damaged trees.
The normal time for dormant-season grafting is after the buds swell and the bark starts to slip. All budding and grafting requires that the scion wood or buds be dormant.
If you plan to try doing this, you need to gather your twigs now and put them in the refrigerator inside a plastic bag. This will keep them dormant until the trees outside start to grow. The process requires dormant scions that must be gathered now. Select long, willowy scions with vegetative buds.
Take some time and replicate some new plants in your garden this spring. It makes good lunchtime conversation to let them know down at the office that you are involved in some high level cloning work in a laboratory in your own back yard. The results will be more interesting and hopefully more productive plants in your garden.
