mrclint I really like that video but my orchard space is roughly 120'X40'. There is room for 40+ 8' Tall 6' Wide trees plus berry bushes and my vegetable garden. All but seventeen spaces are taken and all my trees have been here at least one year in pots. Not one of them has been pruned as an espalier. I just don't see any advantage to putting espaliered trees in the same row as my none espaliered trees. Not only would it reduce production and mess up the aesthetics of my orchard. I would have to add posts on either side of each tree since they are in between trees that are already planted making it more difficult for me to access the back side of the trees to prune, spray and pick fruit. Don't take it personal; its not an attack on you or espaliers. Espaliers are great for tight spaces where no other system will work. However I don't have a tight space. I'm just trying to fit more trees into the space that I have.

Italiangirl, Thank you also for your reply and your effort to assist. Allow me also to add the following, which may offer more perspective on my enquiry about WHY I am discussing the success of patch budding established fig trees (over other methods like chip budding) for the purposes of adding on other varieties...... I want to bud/graft low down on the main trunks now, without much time delay, rather than first chop down the limb to that same level and wait for thin side shoots to emerge, and then wait again until these shoots are hardened enough to chip bud. If the patch budding method IS reasonably successful in figs, it means I can proceed with the budding immediately, hence saving substantial time. Note, we are in late summer here in Sydney Australia so budding season is still definitely ON!!!

Eukofios, Thank you for your thoughts on sealing and binding the fig cleft-graft. In reply to your interest about my own experiences with fig grafting, I can summarise my personal observations in the field, thus far, as follows- Chip budding using current season's growth as buds matched onto rootstock material of similar growth maturity, has proven to be VERY easy and successful in my trials recently (we are now in the middle of autumn here in Australia). "Patch budding" (which is different to T budding or chip budding) has also proved successful for me, however it has many disadvantages over chip budding....The patch budding proceedure can only be done successfully when the bark of the recipient and the donor both slip easily....Also if the bark of the patch is much thinner than the bark around where it will be placed, it will always fail to take in the fig. I have therefore come to the conclusion that chip budding is BY A LONG SHOT more versatile than patch budding, and should be the preferred method of budding figs. I would also suggest that it is to be preferred ovet T-budding, if only for the obvious reason that T budding also reuqires the recipient bark to easily slip, which adds restrictions on the timing of the grafting. I have not as yet tried cleft grafting onto figs. Anyway, keep us posted on your results!!

Nope. Any particular reason you might want to do this? I did however, used my own modified T-Bud grafting method, onto regular cacaria rootstock, and it took. This year, I tried a whip and tongue, and I got 100% failure rate. Then I switched over th T-Bud using the book method and got a 3 out of 5 failure rate. So I decided to do the T-Bud method differently, and got close to 100% take rate after that. Now, I feel pretty confident that I got this down, and am addicted to grafting. I have a good sized Improved Brown Turkey tree that just wasn't ripening, and tastes terrible. I grafted Desert King, Peter's Honey, Grosse Monstrueus, LSU Gold, and St. Anthonys onto it. It's been a month now, and it looks like the buds are starting to push, and are still a healthy green. I also have a Conadria Fig which yields okay figs, but during last year I only could ripen 2 out of several dozen figs on the tree. So this year, I grafted over it with Native de Argentile, LSU Purple, Violette De Bordeux, Col de Dame, and UCD 187-25. The graft looks good and healthy. I will try to put a demo online one day. But for now, I'm going to see what happens first before I actually post in order to verify that it works well. So lets see what happens later. Jonathan in San Francisco