Apricot Propagation

Categories: Fruit Growing

Can Royal apricots be grafted into seedling apricots? Do the scions do

well? What is the best time to graft them?



The apricot is grafted readily by the ordinary cleft grafting,

amputating above the forks if the tree is low-headed enough to allow you

to work into the limbs instead of the trunk. Grafts will take all right

in the trunk by bark grafting, but working in smaller limbs makes a

stronger tree. Thi is for old trees and the grafting is done during the

winter. Younger seedlings can be cleft or whip grafted in the stems, but

it is better to bud into the young seedlings with plump buds of the

current year's growth, in June, and by shortening in the seedling above

the buds as soon as they have taken, get a growth on the bud in the

latter half of the same growing season. In nursery practice, trees are

usually made by budding in July or August into seedlings which are then

growing from the seed planted the previous winter. Little seedlings from

under old trees may be carefully transplanted to nursery rows in the

spring and budded the same summer. Cultivated well and irrigated if

necessary, they will not suffer from this transplanting.