Let's see what you have to work with when the root throws off suckers this spring. If they are small you'll need to wait until they build some girth and strength; otherwise it's just so easy to cut right through them. The first thing I learned to do was cleft grafting, and it's still a go-to for me. It works for a broad range of scion-rootstock size discrepancies. I mean you can have a scion matched with a rootstock the same size or many times larger. But if the sizes of the two are close do a whip or whip and tongue if you like. And I really like the way those meld. Sometimes I fall back on a chip. You can place a chip from a pencil-sized budstick on a stick the size of your thumb without much trouble, and you can do it whether the bark is slipping or not, and regardless of whether the wood is supple and splitting readily. Bark grafting is very, very doable, but I've had a few instances where the branch didn't seem to want to grow over the splice well, and the connection seems a little tenuous. But I have a link to a very good tutorial that will get you going on it. Konrad does a super tidy and precise graft that he has pictures of, too. I don't have the link at hand but he'll provide it, I'm sure, if you ask. Those are all spring grafts. In late summer/early fall you can do chipping and budding. These are designed to heal over in the current year and then emerge the following season. So I don't have an exact answer to your question. I do, however, have a caveat, and that is that I don't know as much about what I'm talking about as it sounds like. There are a number of others who frequent this site who do more, and better, grafting in a few hours time than I've done in my entire life. I'm closer to being a newbie than they are, though, so maybe my experience at learning all these things is worth sharing. Some of the things I try to explain are the ones that I've stumbled over while learning. Good luck! Here is a link that might be useful: Joe Real bark grafting link

Voldemort cracks me up .. lol .. or is that a dementor .. not a good sign for a new house.. lol ... that further one.. if i couldnt see to back out of the drive doing my batmobile departure.. it would have been gone.. before that moving truck left ... be done with it ... i mean really.. just run over one kid on a bike.. and watch how p.o.'d the new neighbors get ... they usually have little sense of humor about such ... the closer.. i would remove those two lower sprigs for sure.. and the first time i parked there and i couldnt get my car door open.. i would crawl across the seat.. open the garage.. and cut that one down too.. [if i werent so irritated.. i jsut didnt back up and run the thing over ... [but thats more of a truck thing.. lol] what rocket scientist planted these things.. lol.. oh yeah.. the ones that just left too much work for me to move them.. but if you want the exercise.... it can probably be done ... with a little guidance from us ... ken ps: its more of a flowering shrub pruned into tree shape.. in my use of words ....

Thank you, everyone, for your comments! I'm going to try and keep this short as I'm beat...we've been to our homesite (125 miles away from our current home) on Friday, Monday and Tuesday...and yet, I seem to have the energy to sort through my staggering amount of photos and post on my blog because I want to keep it updated - I just added new photos taken today of the foundation layout! Ah, well, the truth is...I'm so excited that our project is finally in motion that I like to keep looking at the darn photos once I'm at home...kinda to remind me that it's real and I'm not having some great dream that we broke ground or something! ;) Tomorrow I'm going to try and add some helpful tips on my blog about streamlining the bidding process. Layout was done today, piers will be drilled tomorrow and DH is making the trip there without me (and I'm hoping that he takes many, many good photos!) Here is a link that might be useful: Villa della Vigna (The Vineyard Villa Blog)

Thanks so much for the offer, Bob. We do have Cox Cable, and it is connected to the TV monitor. Our VCR-DVD is a Toshiba DVR620KU, and the TV is a Samsung Led TV monitor, SyncMaster, series 3, TA350 and series 5, TA550, whatever that means. I don't know which letters and figures may be useful, so am repeating them all. I am sorry for not having gotten back to this problem for several months. There has been illness in the family, as well as computer problems, which are now solved, hopefully, with the aid of a friend, and what with personal problems and job demands, I just didn't feel like concentrating on the TV/recording problem. What I want most now, and can't do, is to record TV shows. Not HD or HBO or anything--just a few KPBS or sit-com things. Our TV cable service is basic. A visitor showed me that with an HDMI cable, I can watch tapes and DVDs from the Toshiba unit, a step in the right direction. However, I seem unable to bring up anything on the TV screen that will let me record to either the tape or the DVD. There is no place to plug in a coaxial cable to the Toshiba, so I figure that any recording would have to be from signals sent from the TV. (In fact, even if I could send signals directly from the cable connector in the wall to the Toshiba, there would still be no way to select channels to be recorded.) The problem is that all the ports and other places for hitching the TV to the Toshiba are labeled "IN" and, unlike our old TV, there are none for "OUT". Well, Bob, or any other kind person, does it seem that there may still be a way to record to the Toshiba device? Even to be able to record to VHS tapes would be great.