Anti-grafting for fruit

[Guest guest]

I've been thinking about Masanobu Fukouka (One Straw Revolution) and

he was pretty much against pruning and grafting for fruit. A couple

of ideas slid into place about this. Someone here goes on about the

Brix of fruit - well we just trimmed some limbs from a tree and while

peeling the bark off for some projects I realized that some limbs had

a lot more flow in the cambium (living layer under the bark) than

others. I'd guess that would mean that fruit from different limbs on

the same tree could have different brix depending on how much sap was

able to flow to that part of the tree.

As far as grafting, I have native plum trees on my property and have

been told that if you allow them to grow from seed they grow deep

taproots that help anchor them, make them drought tolerant, and help

them bring up minerals from the subsoil. The drought tolerance and

ability to bring up minerals seem like they also would contribute to

the higher brix of the fruit over grafted varieties.

My understanding is that one of the main uses for grafting is to

dwarf trees. Thus the root system is limiting top growth - assumably

by limiting the amount of sap available to help the tree grow the

rate it would normally. So the study I read that trees on their own

roots produce higher nutrition fruit makes sense. It also helps

explain the other point of that study - that the older the tree was,

the more nutritious the fruit was, because the root system would have

spread further and deeper, thus allowing it a wider range to get the

micronutrients it needed, not to mention it had time to develop the

symbiotic relationship with the right kinds of mycorrhizae, which

could never happen in modern chemical-laden soils of fruit orchards.