Hello citrus growers

We are new to this forum but our trees are old! We are looking for some advice about grafting onto citrus rootstock and thought you guys might be able to help.

The story: we have a small family farm in Greece in the north part of the Peloponnese full of gone-native lemon trees that we want to resurrect. They were planted 25-30 years ago and were lemon scionwood grafted on to 'wild orange' (which we think is sour orange) rootstock. Lots of the trees lost leaves from fire and frost 5-10 years ago and since growing back, have produced wild oranges. We would like to experiment which getting some trees producing fruit that we might want to eat.

We don't know much about grafting apart from knowing that we will be doing cleft grafting!

Does anyone know about this kind of thing, especially in Greece? Or will cleft grafting citrus somewhere else be applicable in Greece?

Any advice re time of year, kind of scionwood bearing in mind the climate and possibility of other fruit on the sour orange rootstock would be gratefully received. Also any top tips from someone who's done this before!

Thanks for your help

Lemongrafters

Welcome to the forum. It doesn't matter what part of the world you are located in, grafting is all the same. How about some photos?

Welcome to the forum,

You will find some great information on cleft grafting by searching old notes on this forum. YouTube also has some good videos.

I have only been cleft grafting for about 2 years, but would like to share a couple of things that I learned:

First, green wood and green wood with grey streaks on your rootstock will accept grafts better than older wood. If you don't have green wood, consider cutting back some older branches so they will sprout green wood.

Secondly, cleft grafts will work any time of the year (in the tropics), whereas budding is primarily only successful when the rootstock bark is 'slipping' from sap flow. This is a big advantage for cleft grafts.

A key to success (after good root-scion cambian contact, of course) is preventing the scion from drying out. I wrap it completely with plastic kitchen wrap.

John

Hi both

Thanks for the welcome!

The farm is in Greece but we are based in the UK, but we can send photos in after Easter, as we are going for Easter - hopefully to graft but I don't know if we've left our planning a bit late..

Thanks for the top tips John. I am a complete ignoramus about all this kind of thing - is green wood just those thinner younger branches with smooth bark rather than thicker branches with rougher bark? Grafter no 2 (husband) has done some grafting before in his youth (or seen it done at least) and thought that what we would do on this trip would be to take a chainsaw to the trees and cut them off quite low down, wait for some new branches to sprout then graft on to them on the next trip. Does that sound right to you, unless we have green wood in which case we could graft this time?

Right I'll get searching on the forums.

Thanks again

Mezza