Grafting and Budding to Propagate Favourite Apple Varieties

Why Grafting Beats Sowing Pips

Every Bramley, Cox's Orange Pippin and Egremont Russet in a British orchard is effectively a clone, kept alive by hand for centuries. Sow a pip and you get a seedling apple — sometimes pleasant, more often sharp, woolly and nothing like its parent. Grafting sidesteps that lottery by joining a scion, a piece of the variety you actually want, onto a rootstock that supplies roots, anchorage and vigour.

It is also a repair kit. A tree that has lost its bark to rabbits or a strimmer, or an old standard that has gone hollow in one limb, can be bridged or top-worked back into cropping. Many heritage varieties survive today only because someone took a knife to a tree in February and made the join hold.

The golden rule never changes: the cambium — the thin green layer just beneath the bark — of scion and rootstock must meet and stay pressed together while callus tissue knits the two into one. Everything else is technique.

Rootstocks and Collecting Scion Wood

Choose your rootstock before you cut anything, as it decides the size and habits of the finished tree. For a small garden or a row of cordons, M27 or M9 keep things compact but need staking and decent soil. M26 is the forgiving all-rounder, MM106 makes the traditional half-standard, and M25 suits a full standard in a grazing orchard.

Scion wood is cut on a dry, mild day between December and early March, while everything is dormant and the buds are tight.

• Take this season's growth — pencil thick, 20–30 cm long, with at least three good buds.
• Cut from the sunny side of the tree, avoiding soft water shoots and any wood showing canker or scab.
• Tie in labelled bundles with the variety name written in pencil, which outlasts marker pen outdoors.
• Store somewhere cool, dark and slightly damp: a sealed bag in the salad drawer, or heeled into damp sand in a shed.

Whip-and-Tongue: The Workhorse Join

This is the graft to learn first, best done from January to March while both partners are still dormant. It suits wood of matching diameter, anywhere between pencil and finger thickness.

• Make a smooth sloping cut 3–4 cm long on the scion, in one clean stroke away from yourself. A single flat cut heals far faster than a whittled one.
• Repeat on the rootstock, then cut a short tongue into each slope, starting about a third of the way down and angling upwards.
• Interlock the tongues so the cut faces sit flush. There should be cambium contact along the full length on at least one side, ideally both.
• Bind tightly with grafting tape or self-adhesive parafilm, then seal the exposed top of the scion with wax to stop it drying out.

If the diameters do not match, a side graft or cleft graft is more forgiving: slide the scion in so one edge of bark lines up neatly and ignore the rest.

Budding in Summer

Budding uses a single bud rather than a whole stick, so a little scion wood goes a long way and the wound seals quickly. It is done from mid-July to late August, when the sap is running and the rind lifts cleanly from the wood. Chip budding is the most reliable in a British summer: cut a shallow chip from the rootstock about 20 cm above ground, cut a matching chip carrying a bud from the scion, then fit them together like a jigsaw and wrap, leaving the bud itself uncovered. T-budding, or shield budding, works the same way but slips the bud behind a T-shaped slit in the bark — famously quick when the sap is rising well.

Look at the bud after three weeks. A plump, green, firmly attached bud has taken; a shrivelled one has not, and the rootstock can be left to sprout and re-budded or grafted the following spring.

Renewing Old Trees

Badly damaged trees are worth a second chance. Where a limb must come off, saw it back and use a rind (bark) graft in spring, sliding prepared scions under the lifted bark around the cut edge. Where an animal has ringed the trunk, bridge grafting restores the flow of sap: take long scions of a compatible apple, slip both ends beneath the bark above and below the wound, and pin them in place. Shelter, water and a season of patience usually do the rest.

Aftercare and the First Season

• Rub out every shoot that breaks from the rootstock below the join — it will outgrow and starve the scion if you let it.
• Check ties in midsummer. Loosen anything cutting into swelling callus, then re-tie.
• Stake the new leader and fit a spiral guard against rabbits and voles.
• Water young grafts through dry spells for their first two summers.
• With a successful bud, cut the rootstock back the following March to about 10 cm above the bud, forcing it to grow away.

Clean your blade between trees with spirit to avoid spreading canker, and label everything — variety, rootstock and date. Expect 30–60 cm of growth from a good scion in its first summer. Some joins fail; that is normal, and the remedy is simply to try again next winter with fresh wood and a sharper knife.