Has anyone found a good solution to getting small quantities of grafting compound? Last I heard, to buy Doc Farwell's, you had to buy a gallon. If someone who lives in the Portland area wants to sell me a small quantity, like a pint or a quart, I would be interested in that. Otherwise, I'll have to figure out something else. Whip and tongue grafting season is upon us.
Thanks,
John S
PDX OR
I tried to buy the Swiss Gashell grafting wax as it was highly recommended by someone on another forum. It was sold out. Then I thought I found it and,......... I accidentally bought a different brand, which says, use doc farwell's over this for best results.
Not what I was looking for.
So now, I am entering the exciting world of making my own. I looked up many places for DIY home made grafting seal/paste/compound/wax, etc. I bought the cheap toilet ring wax for $1.98, and some beef fat for $5 a pound. Now I'm waiting for my powdered pine resin to arrive and begin the experiment. I think I might add some Elmer's glue and latex paint if I can find some lying around. Never a dull moment in the world of home orchards. Results will arrive shortly.
John S
PDX OR
You'll want to take into account the viscosity/degradation characteristic of your material. TOC noted OVERZEALOUSLY applied Doc F's product, designed for graft sealing etc., impeded the underlying grafting rubbers from degrading in their normal event breakdown, leading to girdling and subsequent death/loss of the effected grafts.
Yes, I remember Shaun talking about that. I do agree it makes sense to have some restraint in that. I usually open them some time during the growing season, after they are clearly growing. I have noted more problems with small holes in the coverage, leading to drying up of the graft union. Good things to be careful about when grafting in general.
John S
PDX OR
The powdered resin came in last night, so I did the experiment today. I started to heat up the beef fat, which was in almost all of the recipes I saw. Then I realized that this was a bad idea. I am cooking big white globs of fat until the grease comes out of them. It's going to take a long time. What I need is rendered fat, where the whole thing will turn into liquid grease when heated. Walmart was the only store that I saw that had it. They had less than a pound of beef tallow for $14. A local Mexican butchery/deli has 1 lb. of manteca, pig fat, for $4. Sold. So much cheaper than the tallow from Walmart. Tallow or manteca is already rendered. It's so much easier to deal with.
I had an old burner, pot, and cheap double boiler set up. It's a tuna can with water and another can inside. I put both into the cooking pot. I put the manteca(pig lard) in the double boiler can, and heated it up. Then I added the powdered resin when the fat was liquid and hot. That seemed to help it dissolve. It stays sticky and apart from the liquid if it's not hot enough. I decided to use glass jars, because I wanted something with a tight lid to store it in afterwards, so it wouldn't dry out. I cut up the toilet ring wax and left it in the jars. I put the hot grease from the cooking beef fat into the double boiler can too, so it was mostly pig lard with some beef grease. I dropped the hot resin/fat mixture into the wax in the jars. It didn't melt right away. I stirred it and it slowly started to melt. I continued to chop it up and stir it. I added a bit of wood glue to one jar, as that was recommended on some of the DIY pages. I also added a bit of clay to one of the jars to see the effect. I got out some biochar, as some recipes recommended charcoal. I hadn't crushed it yet, so I'm going to crush it before I add it.
As the jars cooled and neared ambient temperature, they seemed to mix better and solidify a bit. I had to add a lot more wax as the process went on. I just checked it about an hour ago and the texture was pretty good: halfway between a soft solid and liquid. Today was only step one: to see if I could make something close to Doc Farwell's. It's pretty close in color and texture, but not nearly as uniform. For Doc Farwell's, I have to buy a whole gallon of DIY for $75 and 30 bucks for shipping, and this is way cheaper, so that's a good start.
I am going to go to step 2 soon: Seeing if it will actually work when I graft something. That might happen tomorrow. I'll keep you posted.
JohN S
PDX OR
Sure enough, I grafted with the new compound today. It was harder than yesterday. I heated it up lightly to improve the flow. I also added some Canola oil. Vegetable oil is in many of the recipes. It did seem to improve the flow a bit. It still felt very fatty and waxy. I felt like I should add some chalky powder-not flour. I decided to add corn starch. It really seems to make it work better. It feels more like something that can go on semi-liquid or soft, at least, and then dry hard and waterproof. It hasn't dried yet, so I don't know, and I probably won't know until tomorrow. It's supposed to rain tonight, so we'll get some of that info, too. Fingers crossed.
John S
PDX OR
It has held on remarkably well during these huge rainstorms. It is not attractive looking. It looks like fat, which it largely is. It has become harder in the last few days, but it is still moldable. I'm a little bit worried about it melting in strong heat, especially during persimmon grafting time. I may have made adjustments to it by then.
John S
PDX OR
Dubyadee said
With animal fat and cooking oil won't you have birds and rodents trying to eat your compound and destroying the grafts?
That's an excellent question. I know that all of the others also used beef fat and none mentioned a problem. I don't see problems yet, but it's very recent. It also has pine resin in it, which has a more pronounced odor, in my opinion, than anything else in it and that doesn't smell like food. It also has wood glue in it and I'm planning on adding latex paint. It will be interesting to see.
JohN S
PDX OR
ML said
I have purchased small tubes of Bonsai Grafting Compound from Ebay that worked quite well . Amazon also carries tubes and small containers of Grafting Compound as well . The prices on both sites is very reasonable . Hope this helps .
I appreciate your ideas, but I wanted to go another direction.
I had never heard of anyone using Bonsai compound until now. Amazon has really tiny amounts of compounds that aren't really for grafting but can be used that way. For $30, I figured I could learn how to make much more of it well and cheaply for the rest of my life.
Haven't you ever been curious about what it's made out of? I wanted to figure it out and give my results to other people, so they could do the experiment their own way. Power to the people! I'm not here to make corporations richer and more powerful. I think we can figure out a lot of this stuff on our own. Then share our results and we'll all be better off for it.
John S
PDX OR
Thank you for your clarification . I can see the benefit of trying to figure out how to make a non-commercial grafting compound . The experience and the knowledge gained is well worth your time and effort . The orchardists of the past had to have made their own , many using what ingredients that were on at hand during those times . There had to be quite a few different formulations that worked . I wish you success in this interesting endeavor .
Kind regards , Michael
So the 2.0 with the corn starch powder worked better than the 1.0. These last two days with record heat, the 1.0 has been looking like it is going to melt.
In the last couple of days, I developed the 3.0. I put some paint in there and added more resin from wood that I chopped for burning biochar. Some resin seeped out of the chopped wood,
so I added it. The grafting seal is no longer transparent.
The new versions seem to hold up quite well and are drying better. They aren't so gooey. I will also be adding more wood glue soon.
John S
PDX OR
Your grafting compound methods are interesting.
Current iPhone version is 16, you have a ways to go to catch up.
If you used minor revisions of 0.1 (3.0, 3.1, 3.2, etc.), that would slow down the version pace.
Use of new ingredient = major revision.
No new ingredient, just altered formula = minor revision.
One thing I realized that I will definitely do next time is to thoroughly heat up the wax before the mixing. I guessed that since the water that the resin is mixed into is really hot, it would mix the wax completely. Not so. There are little bits of wax floating around. I was also worried that I would leave too much wax in the container I'm melting it into. Not so worried about that anymore. Also, I will use less wax and fat. More resin, glue, paint. It seems to be working quite well so far. Minor cracks in it, but I can smooth them out easily afterwards, unlike Doc Farwell's. We'll see. I made a lot for not very much money and I'm getting better at it.
JohN S
PDX OR
It will be interesting to see how the various revisions do as the season progresses. I'm curious how you wound up with fat as a major component. I don't think that's in Doc Farwell's, but I can see the appeal because of the consistency.
I'm still nursing a little pint or smaller plastic gelato container with Doc Farwell's that is probably 10 years old. I have a piece of plastic between the lid and jar so that it doesn't fuse shut. I've used it thick and then diluted with water again so far this season. Seems still good.
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