Firma rootstock flush

Shrivelled defoilated limb. Just a few. Everything else looks healthy. Should i trim off limbs that look like this?

how about a pic of the scion???

sure.. prune it off in july or august.. when winter is actually over.. and also spring ...

you are being a bit to antsy here ... you can always prune later.. you can not glue the pieces back on.. after you cut off parts.. that may look dead.. but end up budding out ...

crikey man ... lol

ken

ps: yeah.. i have spring fever too .. but i still have a foot of snow ... in some places ...

May I ask who made and marketed these grafts?
I thought the "firma grafters" had become hard to find; Porterhowse and Bethlehem are obviously closed now. There was a guy in NC but when I emailed him a couple years ago he didn't seem interested in selling retail.
Anyhow I suppose in interior Southern California firma would have some utility as a rootstock for some species. OTOH I'm pretty sure the coast is cool enough that a variety of firs would grow on their own roots no problem. At UC Davis...hardly cool in summer, but with crisp nights...these species grow almost certainly on their own roots:
Abies alba
Abies cephalonica
Abies durangensis var. coahuilensis
Abies grandis
Abies nordmanniana
Abies pinsapo
Abies vejari

Nowhere in California has the conditions of incredibly high summer temps, high humidity and extremely moist soil in summer that makes Abies firma (and probably a few related firs in the same phylogenetic group) the only fir that will survive.

just a side

kjm, FIRST YEAR OF GARDENING

pretty advanced jargon you're using,,,,,,congrats

it took me years to learn some of this stuff

onward and upward

ron

Hi David, I got them from all over, anyone who I could find who had them. I am in the interior of Southern California. I do have very high summer temps. I hope I didn't waste my time and money searching and for them specifically because I was told that my best bet was Firma grafts and that they would not even be a sure thing. I have A. Koreana, A. Lasiocarpa, A. Procera, A. Pinsapo, and A. Squamata on Firma. All are doing well except for the few defoilated shrivelled limbs on my Icebreaker's I was asking about (pic 2, but I will wait to see what those limbs end up doing as per Ken's recommendation) and my A. Procera's, they just do not like the heat. One blaue hexe died within a week or two, the other I still have but it is struggling, and I have an A. Procera Sherwoodi that is also struggling. A. Squamata and A. Lasiocarpa are both doing the best with no defoliation signs of stress at all.

Anything I did try that was not on Turkish or Firma have died :( If they were on Balsam they were the first to go. When can I buy some of the species you mentioned on their own roots? Almost everywhere I know of sell grafts.

I have a P. Parviflora that I received as gift plant, I was told it would not survive in my climate but it was free so I figured why not see what happens, and it is now also flushing :) That gives me hope and I may buy more :)

I have a Picea Bicolor and Picea Blue Cloak. They were not what I intended to buy and they have not started to flush yet. I was told Spruces will not survive here so they are a whole nuther experiment, we shall see.

Plantkiller, LOL yes it is due to lots and lots and lots of obsessively reading GW and asking lots of questions to lots of others who know more than me!

Good luck with them Kjmm. I suppose in your climate, you'd have to water the firs so much - because of the high evapotranspiration - that the soil would eventually be warm and moist in much the same way it would be on the east coast, and then you're back to the problem of having root rot.
It's a shame so much of the wholesale nursery industry used Balsam fir as a rootstock instead of even Nordmann, much less Momi fir. It's probably partly how the genus acquired its reputation for difficulty in certain areas like the Midatlantic or lower Midwest.