Earlier this year, while surfing the net, I found an article about growing an English hedgerow and a link to a company selling cheap bare root hedging plants. This idea appealed to me because you could buy a hedge called a fruit and nut hedge. It had blackthorn for sloes, cornelian cherry, damsons, crab apple, dog rose, hazel and more. It was a hedge to help feed birds and other wildlife and at the same time it had useful fruits for jam, cider, wine etc. I remembered how I'd seen some of these the last time I was in England, how lovely they looked and so typically English. I wanted that hedge for down one side of my garden, but that company and all the others I found selling similar plants, would only send to England. I toyed with various schemes to get the plants sent to Sweden, but the cost put me off and I began to look at other ways to get my hedge. Somewhere along the line, I became interested in grafting and managed to find some damson scion wood on ebay. I have a lot of self set plum trees and I intend to graft the damson onto some of these. At the moment my trees are just about still dormant so the damson wood is still in the fridge. I'm not going to go into how grafting is done, but there are some very interesting videos on youtube by a chap called Steven Hayes. One of the grafts he shows is a cleft graft, very good for grafting wood of different diameters together. Busting to try grafting, I grafted some apple scion wood from one of my trees onto another, but to do it I needed grafting wax. I can't afford to buy it so I had a look for recipes online. I found several, but some had resin in them. I don't have a clue what that might be or where I might get it. Some had charcoal powder or even pine tar. The smell of pine tar has a half life of at least a year. Can you imagine mixing that stuff in a kitchen? Don't go there! A lot of the recipes had tallow in them, which is beef fat. In the end, I made up my own simple recipe using equal weights of beeswax (cheap on ebay) and fat which I removed from minced beef when I made a chilli con carne. I put the two together in a jar and heated it in a saucepan of boiling water. The mixture solidified at above room temperature, but could be spread like butter by keeping the jar in warm water.
I was really surprised at how easy this wax was to make and it performed really well. It was very easy to spread into the crack of the graft and around the join, making a perfect watertight seal. For the cost of the beeswax, less than £1, I made enough grafting wax to cover many more grafts than I will be making. Most of the grafts I will be doing on my plum trees will not need wax, but if I need to use grafting wax, I've got some.
As I said, I'm not going to explain how to perform the graft, but this is the graft before waxing.
And this is how it looked after waxing. As you can see, the wax did an excellent job of covering and making watertight all the exposed wood and the split made in the tree.
This is the finished graft after taping with makeshift grafting tape made from strips of freezer bags.
It looks good enough, but time will tell.....
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