Spring Fig Grafting

With spring finally dragging us out of the longest gloomiest winter I can remember, I'm feeling my gardening mojo returning and filling my fingernails with soil and grit once again. My two top gardening obsessions at the moment are apple trees and grafting. As his is the ideal time to graft most plants I'm out in the garden grafting anything to anything. I'm cutting my teeth on the fig tree in the front garden with a collection of scion wood that came from a family friend. They may take, they may not but its good practice for the apple grafting which is soon to follow.

This is a whip graft I did today before the wax goes on.It started out as a saddle graft but the cuts didn't sit together all that well and I saw the possibility for a repeat of the problem in the last photo.

These are my tools. I much prefer the professional grafting tape to cut strips from plastic bags as its not a big investment and has good elasticity to support the swelling of a successful graft. I use a stanley knife instead of a grafting knife because i'm sure they are just as sharp as a proper grafting knife and swapping to a new deadly blade is accomplished in seconds! Also pictured here, grafting wax and the all important tree labels.

Here's the Fig scion wood. They're so potent they've started rooting in the bucket. If there is time, I'll propagate the remaining ones as cuttings which is a no-brainer with figs

All does not bode well for my fig grafting attempts to date though. This is a saddle graft which is about three weeks old know and the scion wood is definitely showing signs of drying out.