What are the benefits of fruit tree grafting and reproduction?

Benefits of fruit tree grafting and propagation: (1) Keep the excellent characters of the variety: Planting the seedling fruit tree directly with seeds for garden construction and planting often leads to the loss of the excellent characters of the original variety.

This is because after cross-pollination, fruit trees have the genetic characteristics of parents, and their offspring are separated, showing different qualities and losing the consistency of the original parent varieties.

The scions of grafted seedlings are mostly collected from mature and stable mother plants, and their genetic characters have been stable, and there will be no variation after grafting, and the excellent characters of the mother plants can be maintained.

Therefore, most fruit trees, such as apples, pears, peaches, plums and oranges, are generally propagated by grafting.

(2) Early fruiting and early high yield: the seedling fruit trees propagated by seeds blossom and bear fruit late, while those propagated by grafting blossom and bear fruit early.

This is because scions used for grafting generally need to be collected from trees that have already borne fruit, and have entered the flowering and fruiting stage. Grafted plants can blossom and bear fruit quickly as long as the trees grow to a certain size and have a certain nutritional basis.

Seedlings of similar fruit trees generally take 7-8 years or even 10 years to bear fruit after sowing, while grafted seedlings generally only take 2-3 years to bear fruit.

The early fruiting characteristics of dwarf rootstock fruit trees are more obvious.

(3) Enhance the stress resistance: The rootstocks used for fruit tree grafting are mostly wild and semi-wild species, which have strong adaptability to adverse environment and can obviously enhance the stress resistance of fruit trees when used as rootstocks.

For example, apples, autumn pears or Li Du pears, oranges and lychees are often used as rootstocks in production, which improve the drought resistance, saline-alkali resistance, barren resistance, cold resistance and disease resistance of these fruit trees to varying degrees.

(4) Accelerate the breeding of improved varieties: some fruit trees are easy to change their characters when they are sown and propagated, and cuttings are not easy to take root. Grafting technology can speed up the breeding, such as the breeding of dwarf rootstocks of apples: grafting dwarf rootstocks on begonia or apple trees, and then breeding in greenhouse, which can breed 4000 ~ 5000 seedlings a year.

(5) Dwarfing trees: Grafting fruit trees on dwarfing rootstocks can dwarf trees, which is not only convenient to manage, but also can bear fruit early, with high quality, stable and high yield, and is suitable for close planting.