Steve:

You can graft or bud more varieties onto the Stella. They won't be rejected and the tree will remain dwarf. There are potential pitfalls however. If the graft wood is virus infected, the whole tree could be ruined. How likely is this? No one can say but after doing a lot of these type trees I'm backing off the multigrafting. Unless you are short space, I'd stay with individual trees.

There are also management issues with unbalanced growth on multi-trees.

Thank you for the response, Fruitnut.

I am short for space.

I am interested in pruning according to the "Vertical Axis System" but am unsure if this means that the entire tree is pruned as a flat, 2-dimensional Christmas tree flat cookie, or if the tree is still in the form of a narrow cone (8' all around; 12' tall)? Do you happen to know?

Secondly, can I train my fruit trees (jujube, Asian persimmon, sweet cherry, and Asian pear all in a 2-dimensional espalier form. This way I can get more variety (number of trees and cultivars thereof), even if less productivity. Or can apples and figs only be trained in this manner, not jujube, persimmon, cherry, or pear?

Thanks,
Steve

I do many multi-grafts and have not yet had virus problems. The only problem I have had with viruses is that G16 is very sensitive to viruses and I have lost many of those which I did multi-grafts to.

Cherries can easily be multi-grafted. I have only done a couple myself but they are fine. The main trick to multi-grafts is to leave enough room so each variety has enough space. If not you will end up with a big mess: lots of disease, and lots of wood being produced with no buds on it. Today I was out pruning and of the 200 or so closely planted (and many multi-grafted) trees I pruned today nearly all were fine but a couple were too crammed and I needed to take major corrective action (bend over a tree to the side, remove a tree, etc).

Scott

I've got virus issues on my multi grafted plums/pluot and possibly on sweet cherry. The plums tolerate the virus pretty well. Yield and quality is still good. However the leaves show definite bleaching of the margins after mid summer. On some multi grafted sweet cherries on Gisela 5, I've stopped getting a crop. I'm not sure it's virus but the leaves look bad after mid season.

In both cases I've got single variety trees, of the same varieties, that don't show the virus symtoms.

Steve,

Pear, cherry can be espalier, not sure about jujube, persimmon.

Butirra Precoce Morettini planted 1994

{{gwi:65955}}

Eric