Sometimes, I'm amazed how knowing the right word opens research doors that have been slamming in your face.  I've been tossing around the idea of grafting new varieties onto my four year old pear trees, but before I undertook such a major surgery, I wanted to hear from people who had tried the same experiment successfully.  Unfortunately, my internet searches turned up very little information...until I stumbled across the term "topwork".

Topworking is the method that orchardists use to change one tree variety to another.  If your trees (like mine) are pretty small (less than three inches trunk diameter), you can simply take a deep breath and cut the whole top off the tree below the first tier of branches and graft your new variety there.  Otherwise, you'll need to graft six to ten limbs that will be the tree's main scaffolds.  If your tree is more than eight years old, it's probably so big that you should spread your topworking out across two or more years, but otherwise you can do the deed all at once.

How do you perform this high stakes grafting?  I'm most familiar with whip grafts that you use to graft scionwood onto rootstock, but whip grafts are only appropriate if both pieces of tree being grafted are roughly the same diameter.  In topworking, you generally have a pencil-thin piece of scionwood being grafted onto a much larger branch or trunk, so you'll want to choose between budding, cleft grafting, and bark grafting.

Budding is most appropriate for cherries, plums and peaches, while apples and pears respond well to other types of grafts.  The choice between cleft and bark grafts depends upon time of year, with cleft grafting working best just as buds begin to swell while bark grafting comes later in the year when bark begins to slip.  (The photos in this post are from the Missouri Extension Service website, which also gives more in depth information about each kind of graft.)

I've decided to perform one cleft graft on each of my pear trees, lopping off the tree top and then inserting two pieces of scionwood in each.  The double scionwood is a way of hedging my bets --- I'll cut one off next year if both take hold.  Stay tuned for photos once I have scionwood in hand and am ready to take the plunge!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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