Wires_Guy_wires
Imperial Masterpiece
I'm throwing this out there because I think I struck gold.
So the past couple of years I've been thinking about my scots pine protocol and I'm still building on it. One of the goals was to get rid of calendars.
Calendars suck because they are points in time, and rarely does nature ever stick to points in time. Instead, nature lives on its own set of rules and our plants seem to follow this.
When grafting junipers, I ran into those exact issues; the Japanese do it in February, we do it in "early spring". But the early spring nowadays lasts for about 3 months and can be summer, fall and winter within the same week.
For my scots pines there are a few key moments where you can see things on the plant itself, like the state that it's in and whether or not it's winter dormant, spring growing, summer growing, summer dormant, fall growing, fall dormant.
Those cues, apparently, are also there in junipers.
So here's my hypothesis:
The best time to graft junipers is when the male pollen cones are fully formed and dropping off at a light touch, or when the female flower structures (those white-ish squares) are just forming on the receiving plant.
This cue is based on whether or not foliage extension happens a week or two later, so just in time of the emerging sapflow.
Can life be that easy? Drop the calendars and see for yourself whether or not it is true that "when the pollen cones drop, the foliage grows a couple weeks later" and "when the flowers emerge, the foliage grows a couple weeks later".
Let's make life plant dependent instead of calendar restricted.
Opinions and experiences are very much welcome.
So the past couple of years I've been thinking about my scots pine protocol and I'm still building on it. One of the goals was to get rid of calendars.
Calendars suck because they are points in time, and rarely does nature ever stick to points in time. Instead, nature lives on its own set of rules and our plants seem to follow this.
When grafting junipers, I ran into those exact issues; the Japanese do it in February, we do it in "early spring". But the early spring nowadays lasts for about 3 months and can be summer, fall and winter within the same week.
For my scots pines there are a few key moments where you can see things on the plant itself, like the state that it's in and whether or not it's winter dormant, spring growing, summer growing, summer dormant, fall growing, fall dormant.
Those cues, apparently, are also there in junipers.
So here's my hypothesis:
The best time to graft junipers is when the male pollen cones are fully formed and dropping off at a light touch, or when the female flower structures (those white-ish squares) are just forming on the receiving plant.
This cue is based on whether or not foliage extension happens a week or two later, so just in time of the emerging sapflow.
Can life be that easy? Drop the calendars and see for yourself whether or not it is true that "when the pollen cones drop, the foliage grows a couple weeks later" and "when the flowers emerge, the foliage grows a couple weeks later".
Let's make life plant dependent instead of calendar restricted.
Opinions and experiences are very much welcome.
