Marc, if someone is using it to cut away from them, they must be very experienced since the knife is working strongly against them. If you are cutting toward yourself with a grafting knife the flat part of the blade faces the wood, and as the cut gets longer the flat blade rests perfectly flat along the wood and helps guide the progress of the cut by the alignment with the already-cut flat surface. Basically, it makes it super easy to make a very flat cut and if you have two flat cuts you get great stock/scion alignment. If you are cutting away you only have the short bevel area against the wood and unless your hands are very good the knife will wobble up and down and you will get a jagged cut. Scott

I know only air layer grating I used it for grapes and Apple to creat a new variety on the same tree or to save a branch I was going to cut any way and creat a new tree I did it with good sucess. I don't know if you can do the same with Figs. In Figs we root cuttings. It is a very famous way to create a fig tree. I did quiet some this way. Some fruit trees like Mango has to be grafted or you get lousy tasting fruit.

I grafted one other variety onto the mother tree for more variety. The mother tree is kind of a slow grower and produces green figs with red flesh. The scions that I grafted onto some of the branches are black figs. I'm calling the new variety cuttings "Black Israel". The cuttings came from a friend of my fathers in Florida. She has a large tree in her yard that the previous owner originally got from Israel. Next year I'll graft on another kind as well. I'm on my way to making a franken tree! This is also beneficial because I have limited space in my greenhouse and I want diversity with my figs. I hope to have quite a contrast of colored fruit on the tree. Thanks, Little John

I'd like to clarify some of the confusion regarding the "fuse-grafting techniques, and training methods that I have used on some trees. I will employ this same method on the fig trees that I have just purchased. I realize that this technique is not for everyone. I just wanted to share this information with you guys. Use it as you wish. "Fuse-grafting" techniques DO NOT involve cutting into the healthy bark so that the cambium layers can be aligned. No wounds are created by this technique so no insects or diseases will enter or infect the trunks being joined. No special follow-up treatments are needed. It is not labor-intensive. Once the stems are joined together, just follow your regular fig growing routines. The mainstems are simply screwed together to create a fatter, and stronger "trunk". The "composite-trunk" will not be weak, nor will they pull apart. The screwheads will quickly be covered over with new bark, and in time, you will not be able to tell that the heavy, fat trunk was at one time, made up of individual stems. This "grafting" will take a few years, and the spaces between the individual trunks will fill in and smooth over with new bark. Your trees will look like a bundle of tied-up cornstalks for a while so be patient. In addition, this method consolidates plant material which would normally be grown in separate containers. I do not have the space to grow individual trees, so I needed to find a way to grow my fig trees in one container. Fuse-grafting to the rescue. Now I'll have three times the plant material growing in one place ... and maybe three times the figs too. I also like seeing trees with short, fat, trunks with lots of taper supporting a nice rack of ramified branchlets. More branches, more nodes, more nodes, more figs. This preference is a hold-over from my bonsai days. Large diameter trunks convey age and endurance. Exposed rootage does too. I like thinking outside the box. I know that this training method might be too unconventional for some, but I'm going to try it out to see how well it works...or, fails. Wintering-over will still be a problem for me. I have an unheated shed where I stored some fig trees over the winter '06. The trees did OK. I'm hoping for the same results with my new trees. I've also read that fig trees can be brought into a heated room to break dormancy about a month before they are ready to be grown outside. For my zone, this would probably be around mid, to late April. I'll try bringing my trees in on Tax Day and I'll put them outside around Mother's Day. I read that it takes about two weeks for dormancy to break and for buds to swell, and, at least another two weeks before the new leaves start suffer from low light. Any thoughts...pro or con?