I've never grown loquats, but I've had the fruit and they're pretty tasty. Unfortunately, winter frosts usually kill the late-autumn-blooming flowers in most of the mainland United States.

I plan on eventually moving somewhere warmer, where I'd imagine loquats would be one tree I would grow. And I've always thought, what would I do to get it to fruit? There's the obvious solutions of protecting the tree in winter with a temporary greenhouse set up, or just protecting the inflorescences with bags - maybe using hand warmers to provide heat on cold winter nights.

But then I read that if you graft a flowering branch of a plant onto a plant of the same species that isn't flowering at the moment, it will induce the plant to flower. So you could keep a loquat tree outdoors, unprotected, and keep a small one in a pot, then when winter comes, you overwinter the potted plant indoors (which is easy enough to do). Then after the winter frosts have passed, you graft a branch of the flowering potted plant onto the outdoor tree (if the flowers have died from the winter). You'd get loquats a little later than usual, but you could get regular production and a lot too depending on the size of your tree.

What do you guys think? Would this work? There is the obvious trouble with grafting a flowering branch, since a lot of energy is being directed towards flowering (which is why you usually never do it).

I'm thinking you might even just be able to draw some cambium fluid from the potted plant and inject it into the tree - or some similar system (from what I read whatever flowering hormone might exist probably comes from the leaves, so you might have to do this on softwood).