In the spring trees and bushes send out new growth. If you have grafted plants (a lot of fruit trees are like this. The roots belong to a different plant than the top. The top has the fruit you want.) In the spring: trees send out growth below graft unions. Roots prefer themselves, to what has been attached to them. They want to grow out from below the graft. If you allow this to happen, your graft will weaken and eventually fail.
If you aren’t careful you will be stuck with the root stock, and that was not chosen for the fruit: it was chosen for vigor and disease resistance. Look at your trees often. If you see leaves coming out from below the graft union either use a sharp knife and cut back to the main trunk, or if you can, you can rub or use your nails to pinch off the growth.
Something that I realized recently was: I bought a suckering plant and kind of ignored it’s growth habits. It’s a pomegranate.
Last year, for the first time: I got exactly one fruit (usually I get 50 or more fruit.) The fruit was small and wasn’t worth the effort to remove the arils. It didn’t flower last year either. Lots of lush growth though. It has not flowered this year either.
I looked at my giant mess of suckered pomegranate trunks and it struck me: was this plant grafted? I looked it up on the site I bought it from a decade or so ago. Yes. The pomegranate I had was grafted. That means everything that has come up away from the main trunk is not the pomegranate variety I purchased AND the heavy freeze we got a couple of years ago, more than likely completely killed off the variety I assumed I was growing.
This is a huge mess. I am really mad at this nursery for grafting onto suckering rootstock. Madder still, at myself, for not paying attention. If you are interested in growing pomegranates, sea berries, jujubes or other suckering plants: get them as: “own root”. If you can’t find options for plants (that sucker) and your nursery does not have options for grafted versus “own root”, I suggest looking for a different type of fruit. Lots of plants come up as trees and do not shoot out runners. The ones that do send runners, should not be grafted.
If you want to spend a whole lot of time on your plant (which I don’t advise unless you only have a couple of plants.): you can chase the suckers around every spring and cut them from the main plant and dig them out. However, that is a huge amount of work.
These are things to seriously consider when creating a food forest.
Meet you out in the garden to get the fruit we purchased and not some garbage from a lesser quality rootstock.
Crazy Green Thumbs
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This is a topic that more garden columnists should write about! This is the first time that I ever noticed anyone else do so! It is a common problem with citrus trees.
I did my research on jujube. They send out runners and create a thicket. I almost bought one, and then I saw it was grafted. Nothing that suckers and runs should be grafted. I can find them on their own roots. However, after the pomegranate thicket formed: I’m no longer interested in caring for plants like this. Good to see you today! Hope you are doing well.
Grafting jujubes makes no sense to me. I read that the cultivars do not sucker on their own roots. If that is so, I can not imagine whey they are grafted onto the understock that suckers so badly. However, it seems to me that grafted trees do not sucker as long as they are grafted, and only start to sucker if they lose their scion, like if the original tree gets cut down. I got my understock from such a thicket of understock from a tree that was cut down. That particular tree was there for decades without suckering, and started to sucker only after getting cut down.
Interesting! I have heard of plants that turn into thickets. In my own experience cane fruits, sea buckthorn/sea berries, passion flower and sumac have all suckered profusely and some sent out thirty foot runners their second year, before the original plant really had done anything. But I don’t think any are grafted. Of course the one thing that was (the pomegranate), I would definitely not recommend growing unless it’s by cutting or seed. I have seen all kinds of trees sucker after being cut down. I don’t often remove viable trees so I haven’t had that issue.
But if you do not grow it from cutting or seed, how else would you grow it? Do you mean that you would not grow a specimen that is grafted onto understock?
Yes. Probably could have made that more clear.
Good tip! I have a grafted Sylvia dwarf cherry, so I’ll keep an eye out for those below-the-graft sproutings!
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