hey guys it's caleb welcome back so in today's video i'm going to be grafting three different varieties of apple onto this apple tree that i've got here and i wanted to bring you along and just share with you how i'm going to be doing that what i've got here is three different branches from my mum's trees of apple varieties so here i've got a granny smith apple which is a green apple i've got a gala apple and also a monty surprise which is a really large apple these are going to be getting attached onto this tree here onto these branches and i'll be using a technique called whip and tongue just a quick disclaimer as well i am pretty new to grafting but hopefully i can kind of explain it in a way that does make it fairly easy for you guys to give it a go as well so to briefly explain what grafting is you basically need to start with two types of plant material you have your root stock and you also need some cuttings from an apple tree variety that you want and these are called your scion the type of root stock that you use will determine the vigor of the tree and therefore will determine the size that the tree will grow to some root stocks are also selected for their resistance to pests and diseases and certain types are better adapted to different soils and climate conditions as well as for your scion once you've grafted it onto your rootstock it will grow and produce the same variety of fruit as the tree you took your scion from this apple tree here i actually planted just recently just the other day actually and i got it from my mum's place it was just growing on its own next to one of her apple trees my own actually grew from the roots of this tree and this tree is on a dwarfing rootstock so the little tree or rootstock that i've got should be a dwarfing variety as well basically all i've done is just dug a nice big deep hole planted the tree into there and then given it a bit of a top dressing of compost i then put a layer of cardboard over the top to suppress any weeds from coming up and then i put a nice thick layer of mulch over the top of that so this is all ready to go now hopefully he shouldn't need too much watering over the summer now that he's got a nice big thick layer of mulch to keep that moisture in but i'll bring her in close anyway and we can have a go at grafting these onto this tree so i've got a few tools i need i've got some secateurs and a grafting knife as well you guys can just use a stanley knife too if you want and this is mainly what i've used i've only just got this recently you want to give them a good clean before you start i've just got some methylated spirits here and so i'm going to be just rubbing that over the blades so that they're sterilized and they don't spread any disease or anything like that so the first thing i'm doing is just trying to match the diameter of the scion with the diameter of the rootstock branch where i want to attach it once i've found a point where they're about the same thickness i'm just going to cut the rootstock and cut the scion wood and that's the point where i can now make my grafting cuts so for the whip and tongue grafting technique i'm just going to do a long angled cut onto the rootstock if you can do this in one swipe then that's really good it takes me a few goes because i'm just a beginner and once you've done that you can make a cut onto your scion wood that matches you want to make sure that the cuts that you do are nice and flat you don't want them to have a curve in it because then they won't sit nice and tightly together so now i've got to cut the tongue part of the whipping tongue graft so i come about a third of the way down the cut and slice into it and just cut about two-thirds of the way down the cut so you're just slicing in as sort of quite shallow and making sure that you don't cut right through and come out the other side just make sure when you do this you're really super careful because it's really easy for the knife to slip and then cut yourself so let the knife do the work don't put the pressure on the knife just kind of rock it side to side and it should just slide its way in there but be very careful like i say it's very very easy to cut yourself and if it cuts your hand with such a sharp knife it can cause a really bad injury so now i just need to make that same cut onto the root stock so we just put our knife about a third of the way down and just slowly cut down about two thirds of the way down the cut okay so now that we've done that we can slide them together so basically that little tongue or that little wedge should just be able to slide into the other one and that will actually hold it quite securely and and hold it together and in place and that way any wind or if it gets knocked or something like that it's not going to bump the graft apart if you get to this point and it doesn't look quite right you can always re-cut your scion and re-cut your rootstock and try again so don't worry too much if it doesn't work the first time and so if you want to get some more practice you can just use prunings from a fruit tree or a willow tree and just have a go making these cuts and joining two branches together and that way you'll increase your confidence with it so when you do it for real you know you're going to be a little bit better at it and yeah it's just a good way to practice so for a graph to be successful the cambium layer of the rootstock and the scion has to line up and be in contact so for a graph like this i just make sure that the bark is lined up and flush on at least one side of the graft and that will mean that your cambium layer should be in contact because the cambium layer is just the layer of living tissue just underneath the bark and so if the bark's lined up then the cambiums hopefully will be as well don't worry about trying to get both sides completely perfect just make sure that one side lines up really well and the other side can either line up or not so now we've just got to wrap our graft with some grafting tape so basically this is just to hold in moisture stop excess moisture getting into it and also stop it from drying out so it will also help hold it together as well so pretty much you just need to wrap idrip from the bottom up so that if there's water that goes on it like rain it can shed off more easily kind of like a roof would so yeah wrap it from the bottom twist it around work your way up and then pretty much once it's wrapped then you're good to go if you think the cuts in your graft aren't really held tightly together then you can kind of twist your grafting tape and then wrap it around almost like a string and wrap it around nice and tight and that will hold those layers together really well i did make a bit of a mistake with this one though and did it a bit too tight but you'll see more about that later in the video so that's pretty much all you need to do and just make sure that your scion has about two or three buds on it and it should be totally fine i ended up putting a bit of pruning paste on the tip of my scion wood as well just because this is in the full sun and the full wind and i was worried about it just drying out a bit too much and with this one as well i did end up wrapping graph tape over the whole scion wood and this is probably a bit overkill for an apple graft because apples are typically pretty easy but this is just like i say an extra measure i took because i was worried about it drying out in the sun and in the wind all right so we're all done it's a bit random how i've kind of covered this one with the tape and then i've done this one as well but i've also put the pruning paste on the top of the wound and then this one here i've got none of the grafting tape up high but i've got pruning paste on the top to stop it drying out so they're all a little bit different and i'm kind of just winging it and seeing what's going to happen we'll come back anyway in a little while once these have hopefully worked and we'll see how it all turns out alrighty guys so we've got our first bit of growth as you can see just coming through there nice little bud we've got another one coming up down here and this one nothing pushing through just yet but you can see a little bit of green there so fingers crossed for that one you can see that there is some little buds forming below the graft so i'm just coming through here knocking those buds off because we don't want the rootstock putting on branches we only want the varieties that we've grafted on here to grow okay so we've got more of this growth on the root stock down here to pinch off just below the graphs but the grass themselves are doing really well these two have put on some decent growth they're looking really good this one over here for some reason hasn't managed to push through the graph tape so i'm just going to unwrap the top part of the scion to help it along because it is still growing under there so we'll come back in a little bit anyway and we'll see how it's all looking so the one we took the tape off is now going well and putting on some good growth the other ones are going really well too and putting on heaps of growth but i haven't really been keeping an eye on this tree and we do have a bit of an issue that i'm going to show you so this craft here has thickened out quite a lot and clearly i've made the mistake here of just wrapping the graph tape around it way too tight and then leaving that graph tape on for far too long so i'm just going to remove this tape and we'll have a bit of a closer look so yeah this graft here is super ugly it's not the best but it is still alive and growing so now that i've relieved the pressure around it hopefully now the graft can thicken out and end up looking a lot better later on this one here looks good though i haven't over tightened the tape on it so i'll leave that tape on now just to keep the graft going strong because there's no need to remove that right now as for the third one i think i did do that one quite tight unfortunately so let's take all the tape off and just see what that one's doing yeah so i thought this one was done quite tightly too and you can see here that it was so make sure you don't make the same mistake i've done here but all three graphs are still growing well so we'll come back for another update and hopefully these graphs will have thickened out and will look a bit better after some more growth all right a quick little update of the graph that still has the tape on it let's unwrap it and take a look all right check it out this one looks really really good super stoked with how that one's looking and it's quite cool being able to see where the join is like that little zigzag that's there but yeah to me this looks like a really healthy strong graft okay so for the final update you can see that the tree is looking really good it's nice and strong and healthy but i thought you guys might like to see how those graphs turned out they had the tape wrapped really tightly around them so come on in and we can take a bit of a closer look so as you can see they've mostly recovered from the issues we had earlier and they've smoothed off fairly well so hopefully they'll just continue to look better and better as the tree continues to grow and as for the other one that i was quite happy with that one is still continuing to grow really well as well so yeah pretty stoked that i've now got a little triple grafted apple tree so the root stock of this tree has grown a few more random branches out of it which i didn't end up pruning off but it is coming into autumn and winter now so i'm just going to wait until the winter and i'll give this a nice tidy up and a prune up ready for next spring we've got this branch over here which i never grafted because it was quite thin but it's a nice sized branch now so probably next spring i'll add another variety of apple onto this tree as well i hope this video has been of interest to you or encourage you to have a go with grafting yourself and i would recommend starting with apples as your first tree it is sort of one of the easier ones to graft and the technique i showed you is not the only one there's different ways to graft different cuts you can do so you know you don't have to do this one i'd also recommend doing a grafting workshop if you have one near you it's a really good way to get hold of all the materials like the scion and the rootstock and also just connect with other people learn from each other if you guys are daunted by any of this don't worry if your graph doesn't work because your root stock is most likely going to survive it's going to put out new growth and you can try again grafting next spring so just don't be too worried about failing just have a go experiment with it and see what happens but anyway i hope you enjoyed today's video if you did make sure you give it a thumbs up down below i hope to see you guys in the next video but until then have a great rest of your day see you next time