This is the most cut to the chase article I’ve written about graft techniques for plant breeding. I think it’s the most useful, and will hopefully help inspire more experimentation. Let me know what you think.
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Very interesting! Thank you for sharing it!
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I’m a huge fan of your substack! It makes total sense you’re also active here.
I’m especially interested in the applicability to tree crops. A way to bring a plant to fruiting faster would be incredible.
I feel like all the other techniques like double grafting really validate the approach of just trying tons of things because you can. The amount of possible graft combinations with different species, morphology, graft location, and scion age, is so staggeringly large that going off of intuition feels as valid as anything.
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Thanks ! Yea I think that’s totally valid, even a normal intergeneric graft can make a bunch of phenotypic changes in the seed. Tree crop growers will graft out the seedlings to shorten the juvenile phase, but they aren’t doing the mentor pruning in that case, and may not be collecting that seed to look for further variation. It’s kind of a natural outgrowth, like in Michurin’s case, of making and propagating out distant hybrids, because they’re plastic enough to make the graft influence more obvious. Then its just a matter of maximizing it. But yea I think its really promising in tree crops to both propagate and develop crops at the same time, it strikes away at the distinction of breeding the rootstock and scion separately in different breeding programs.
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Yeah, the simultaneous propagation and development seems like it has big potential.
I’m imagining big hybrid “mentor trees” with different crosses and new generations’ saplings grafted all over them.
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