I’ve posted a couple of times on the Chickasaw plum (one of our wild native plums) I planted in the front yard and how I added a cultivated variety of plum to it, along with my interest in grafting wild plum.

A month ago I spent an afternoon popping in grafts on various trees to see what would work and what wouldn’t.

The picture above is one of those experiments; it’s a Sunraycer nectarine scion that’s starting to grow off one of the Chickasaw plum’s suckers.

Here’s another graft that seems to have taken, this time from a peach:

This is getting to be rather fun. I’m imagining what this tree will look like in a few years as I keep grafting stone fruit onto the suckers… it’ll be a veritable fruit cocktail.

As for the cultivated plum I grafted onto it last year, it’s now over 4′ long… and it’s bursting into bloom!

Here’s what the original graft now looks like:

You can still see the “V” of the original cleft graft but it’s healed up nice and tight.

In Create Your Own Florida Food Forest, I mention there are reasons to save wild trees when planning a food forest, one of them being that they may serve you as established root stock you can later graft on top of.

In some parts of Florida there are wild plums everywhere… why not improve upon them?

And speaking of improving, check this out:

I’m particularly proud of that graft because it’s not mine – it’s my wife’s.

Yes, that is Rachel’s very first attempt at grafting, and it’s taken thus far.

Good work, you sexy gardener you.

It’s really not hard to graft. Perhaps next spring I can have a small class on it here for anyone’s that’s interested. That will give me another year to practice my technique and have more to show off around the food forest.

Anyone else doing some grafting this spring?

Shop at Amazon and support Florida Survival Gardening