Hello, dear gardeners, vegetable growers and florists! It’s time to cut cuttings. You ask: for what purpose? And I will answer you: to make a stir in the garden. My dears, many of you, for example, bought fruit trees, planted them, waited for the first harvest and suddenly saw completely different varieties. Some of you grew good trees, but there are too many of this variety, this one or that one. You want some other variety, the same apple or pear, but there is nowhere else to plant them.
So, my dears, we can completely change our fruit trees with grafting, spring grafting. Especially if you have small seedlings, we can make streifling from Antonovka, we can make any other variety from Lobo. So now is a very good time to cut cuttings and use them for grafting in the spring.
So, we come to the variety of apple, pear, plum, cherry that we really want to plant or have in our garden. This could be at our neighbors’, relatives’ – you know that there are some good varieties and it would be good to have such varieties in your garden, in general, so that they bear fruit. So, we come to the tree and cut the branches. Well, try to cut off at least about 20 centimeters. Even if the annual growth is small, we can use the two-year growth. There is nothing wrong with that. Therefore, we cut the cuttings 25 or even 30 centimeters long. Some cut them even longer. As long as they fit in the refrigerator.
So, here we have a branch growing on a tree. This is how it grows. We come up and cut off this part of this year’s growth or two-year growth. This can be done in the garden right away – cut off the length we need. We can even cut them in the same way. This is how we take and cut off a branch from a tree. Here, you see, a very small growth – we’ll take it with these buds. There are even fruit buds here. And we’ll cut it off.
We bring it home. What do we do next? We renew these cuts that we got. If you have long cuttings and you cut 50 cuttings from a large growth, say, 2 cm, then you will get a cutting that looks like this. This is the kind of cutting – damaged on both sides. You see, right?
In order to prevent any infections from getting into these cuts during storage, in order to prevent the cuttings’ tissues from drying out, we can simply seal these rings, these cuts, or use putty, for example, just garden putty like this, like this, look, take and seal these ends. You can use a candle. For example, light a candle. A melted puddle of wax or paraffin forms near the wick. And we simply dip, turning the cutting around its axis, dip it into this puddle. In this way, we seal this cut – nothing gets there.
We put the cuttings together. It is essential that if you cut branches from several varieties, then it is essential that you mark them with some kind of tags – however you like, but it is essential that you know later, in the spring, when you do the grafting directly, you need to know what variety it is. Therefore, first work on one variety, then move on to another.
So, we have processed our cuttings, then we take a cloth, linen or cotton. It is better not to use artificial fabrics. We take a rag of approximately this size. Like this. We lay it out neatly, put the cuttings in place. We put them in like this.
And tightly enough so that they take up less space, we wrap them like this. Like this. It would be enough to have less cloth to wrap them twice, but a little more turned out to be no big deal. These are the cuttings ready for storage.
What do we do next? After all, there is a certain amount of moisture in the wood tissues, in the buds, so we have to wet the cloth a little. What does that mean? We don’t dip it in water – we should never do that. Excess water will simply provoke rotting, various bacteria will form, fungi will wake up, so we simply dip our fingers in water like this and wet them a little. We repeat this procedure literally 2 times.
After that, we should put our cuttings in a bag. Like this. We put them in a bag and wrap them up. Like this, like this. We wrapped the cuttings from one apple tree, from one variety. You can wrap them with a rubber band, a string – it doesn’t matter.
Maybe just put it there. But be sure to sign it. Take a pen and sign it. Well, for example, this was an Antonovka, right? We sign “Antonovka”. And we put it in the refrigerator, in the vegetable section. My dears, at this temperature, which we have in the vegetable section, well, let’s say +2-+4, our cuttings will sleep, they will not freeze. We will be sure that the buds will be preserved, the bark, wood, deep tissue – everything will be preserved and the cuttings will be quite suitable for spring grafting.
My dears, do not miss this time, prepare cuttings, both from cherries, and from apricots, and from apple trees, those that you want to grow in your garden, and in the spring we will definitely make grafts, on which in a year or two we will collect unusual fruits, which we never had in the garden.
Nikolay Fursov. Candidate of Agricultural Sciences
