If hot and sunny set your mister for every 2 hours during the hours of sunlight, cut that in half at night. If cool / rainy then every 4-6 hours. Do that cycle for the first couple of weeks as that is the critical period
One more question: if I sow maple seeds this winter/spring... how long will these trees be in place before I can use them for grafting? Is that 2 years? 3 years?
@Riverdale27 lets say 2 to 4 years depending on your growing season and conditions. Plus all the seedling will not at the same rate. It will take about3-4 years for me to grow the caliber root stock @Otto Bjornson is using where I live. This is 1.5 year old seedling
as @LoverOfMaples mentioned, generally 3-4 years to get a nice size caliber for grafting. Thin root stock can literally snap when trying to make the cut into it as it is so fragile.
Damn, that's a lot of years... I wanted to start already next year :) How thick does the stem needs to be? I bought 10 seedlings from a nursury as a test, some of them are a pencil thick. I read that that is enough? Are there things you can do to optimize growth of the seedlings? E.g. greenhouse, fertilizer, soil, container, etc?
You will know when you feel the thickness of the root stock. Do the two finger / thumb test. It should be solid without any hint of bending when you apply pressure. Pencil thickness is too thin, unless it is carpenters pencil :)
OK so by the finger/thumb test you really mean NO bending at all, understood. But for scions, those are this year's growth... they can never get that strong within just one year, right? They have to be a bit thinner?
Even with the scion wood, first year growth, they do become quite strong as don't forget, they have the entire tree feeding the shoots which allow them to grow much quicker then a young seedling ( root stock) which is still developing its entire root system. A mature cultivator can produce up wards of 100 - 200 scions or more that would be all suitable for grafting. Years ago we would sell scion wood to a large nursery once we had done our grafting. They only wanted the "popular" varieties at the time which included our red dragon dissectum and bloodgood. We have two of each, all 40 - 50 years old producing many suitable scions every year at grafting time. They wanted scion wood only from the local growing region to ensure optimum results.
18 days after grafting and the "critical " period is now over. Still misting but at half the rate. The weather is now at normal or below normal temps ( just fantastic, my kind of summer weather). Of the 50 grafts, 14 did not make it, so 72% success at this point and time. It will change though with other variables likely as I am hoping for a healthy 50 -60% by next spring. The healthy ones are all now expanding their bud sets and pushing out. I will try and get a descent picture or two today and post.
Here are 2 "pixie" grafts, obvious which one survived and is thriving and sadly the other died. I have grafted high enough on to the root stock so that there is two more graft attempts available starting next season.
Never have done winter grafting, only summer. We never had the proper in house heating system in our greenhouse for winter grafting.
grafting update, sept.11 After 6 weeks now we are down to 25 of the original 50 grafts surviving. I knew with the extreme heat periods thru out June / July that it was going to be tough on the scion wood. Also what was interesting is that while some specimen grafts really thrived, others died off fairly quickly. All 5 shishigashira grafts did not make it, while atrolineare and ozakazuki did well (4 out of 5 of each). What surprised me most is that 5 of the 8 full moon grafts took and look great. Pixie and seiryu also did OK. The dissectums also had 5 of the 10 survive.
