Epicotyl Grafting

Hypocotyl versus Epicotyl

I originally thought that I was grafting onto the hypocotyl of the seedling's stem, but was informed that if that part of the stem is above the cotyledons it is called the epicotyl.

 Epicotyl graft is grafting a scion onto a newly germinated seedling's stem.

I should have taken more pictures when I was removing the newly germinated root stock and doing the grafting, but I had total graft failure last year and was not expecting anything better this year. This year's trials were much better with 15 successful grafts out of 30. Grafting stems that are smaller than 1/8" is a real challenge for me.

The epicotyl grafting procedure I used was;

1. To find some very small/thin scion's from my best plants and store them in ziplock bag in the fridge.

                                                   2. Find a rootstock with limited suckers.

3. Germinate the rootstock in a closed container with a 50% mix of vermiculite and peat to produce a long epicotyl stem.

4. Remove the newly sprouted seedlings and cut the stem off at the thickest part about 3/4" from the base.

5. Find a scion about the same thickness as the rootstock stem and trim the scion into a wedge shape.

6. Insert the scion into a vertical cut in the epicotyl stem, then wrap the graft with parafilm. 

7. Next dip the scion and graft into warm liquid paraffin wax. Coating the scion and graft.

8. Then immediately dip in cold water.

9. Plant the grafted seedling in a good potting mix.

10. Place in a closed container with a clear top and maintain the temperature at about 70 to 80º F.

I did mist it a couple times to maintain the humidity.

  

This is the grafted plants 5 days later. As you can see some are suckering up from the rootstock.

Here you can see more suckers and stems starting to grow below the grafts.

I tried removing the suckers, but this was unsuccessful and the swelling buds on the grafted stems dried up.

This is a close up of a failing graft with a stem growing below the graft. 

I moved the grafted plants to the greenhouse to start hardening them off and I noticed catkins forming on the grafted scions. I was so surprised to see catkins on a 2 month old seedling. The catkins were removed to let the plant grow a little bigger during the summer.

This probably happened because the scion was taken from the top of a mature plant.  Next time the scion will be taken from a lower immature stem. The biggest problem is to find a hazelnut rootstock from a newly germinated seedling which will not sucker up. 

This is what the graft looks like after 4 months of growth.

This is a picture of the whole plant after 4 months.

At the end of the summer I had 14 nice looking clones.

Still hazelnuts tend to sucker up and this would interfere with the cloned plant.

So this next growing season I am going to replant with the graft below the soil level and see if roots will develop above the graft. During this period of time any suckers that form on the rootstock will be remove.

I've also thought of using clonal material from these new cloned plants this spring. This would make things a little easier than trying to locate small/thin stems in the orchard.