GRAFTING. Grafting is the uniting of a shoot or scion containing one or more buds to a stock or root with a view, by their union, to iiroduce a superior fruit upon the inferior stalk. There are a number of ways of grafting, cleft grafting being the mode usually adopted. This is simply splitting a stock, first sawed off square, and inserting on each side a scion tapered down to a thin, wedge-shape, with a sharp knife, so the inner bark of the scion and stock will just meet. To insure this meeting at some point the top of the graft is sometimes carried in slightly. The whole is then covered with grafting wax to exclude moisture and air, and the grafts usually take kindly, if the grafting be done at the right season of the year, that is in the spring before the leaves appear. Root grafting is performed in precisely the same manner as stock grafting pieces of root being used as the stock. This may be done late in winter, the roots having been carefully saved in moist earth in a cool cellar for this purpose. The grafts may be cut any time in mild weather in winter, tied in small bundles, and kept in moist sand until wanted. The only tools for grafting, on the farm, is a sharp, panel saw, a keen pocket knife, for paring the stocks and sharpening the grafts, a butcher knife, and a mallet for splitting the stocks, and grafting wax for spreading over the mutilated parts. Saddle grafting is used only with stocks of a size corresponding nearly with that of the grafts. The accompanying cuts will show this manner of ing; a being stock and graft pared to fit each other, b showing the same united. Sometimes the stock is ply pared to a thin wedge and the scion simply split and wedged on, but this is a very crude and less way of operating. In either of the operations of grafting described the whole exposed surface should be well waxed with grafting wax,to keep out water. other common mode of grafting is by approach, or in arching, as it is termed. A modification of this is practiced where the bark of a valuable tree has been jured or gnawed by mice. The injury is pared smooth at the edges of the bark down to the live wood, and a piece of healthy bark fitted accurately thereto, and covered with grafting wax until it is healed; or scions set close together and brought fresh bark to fresh bark at top and bottom, and securely fastened.
Dr. Warder, in American Pomology, in tion to grafting old orchards, and upon root grafting, writes: Old orchards of inferior fruit may be entirely re-made and re-formed by ing the limbs with such varieties as we may desire. A new life is by this •proceSs often infused into the trees, which is due to the very severe pruning which the trees then reccive;. they are consequently soon covered with a orous growth of young healthy wood, which replaces the decrepid and often decaying spray that accumulates in an old orchard, and the fruit produced for several years by the new growth is not only more valuable in kind, according to the judgment used in the selection of grafts, but it is more fair, smooth and healthy, and of better size than that which was previously furnished by the trees. Certain eties are brought at once into bearing when thus top-grafted, which would have been long in. developing their fruitful condition if planted as nursery trees. Others are always better and finer when so worked, than on young trees. In renewing an old orchard by grafting its bead, it will not be a good plan to attempt the whole tree at once; the pruning would be too severe, and would be followed by a profusion of lent shoots breaking out from the large branches, such as are called water-sprouts. Those who. have practiced most, prefer at first, to remove about one-third of the limbs for grafting, and, those should be selected at the top of the tree. The new growth thus has an open field for its development, and the lower limbs will be orated, while they tend also to preserve the librium of the tree in a double sense, physically and physiologically. The next year another • third of the limbs may be grafted, and the• remainder the year following, as practiced by 1Mr. Geo. Olmstead, of Connecticut, who, on the• sixth year from the first grafting, harvested.