Grafting desert apple to crab apple

I have heard many tales from older gardeners, farmers, and general country folks that you can graft bits of an apple tree onto a native crab apple tree. I know that most commercially produced apple trees are based on a graft of one cultivar onto the rootstock of another, but the rootstocks all have fancy names like M25, M26 etc, and never 'Crab apple'.

I'm interested more because I'm contemplating a little experiment. I've never attempted a graft before, but I have a very good book that describes all the methods in great detail, but it makes no mention of using a crab apple tree as a rootstock. I have plenty of crab apple trees on my land that I planted over the winter (they were one year old trees when they went in, and growing nicely now). I also have a couple of cheap cooking apple trees that I bought from Morrisons for a fiver each. As all the trees involved were nice and cheap, I don't mind experimenting on the a bit, but if my experiments fail I won't know if it is because I did it wrong or because the two cultivars are incompatible.

So, is it possible to graft a piece of cultivated apple tree onto a native crab apple tree?

Cheers

 

It is possible to graft the two but I fail to see why, is it to produce another type of apple because more than likely it's possible that trees raised from transgenic root stock may have un-palletable fruits and are likely to be less disease resistant,the only crab apple rootstock to be used successfully as far as I know is one called`Geneva 65` this cross produced reduced sized fruit.Most of these rootstocks are produced after many years of research if your thinking of breaking into the market it could take some time.If you just want to try your hand at grafting try any herbaceous plants you will get quicker results.

 

Thanks for that, Walnut. I don't think I'll be selling either apple trees or apples, although I did look into it, but the costs would be a bit prohibitive for me (mostly the legal aspects - you have to have an annual inspection from DEFRA to make sure your stock is disease free for one thing). I mainly want to try it out of interest really, and hopefully produce enough apple trees to produce enough apples for personal consumption. I could just buy a couple or so apple trees, but that would be less fun

 

I cant see any real problem, then again im no expert on grafting.... only ever done it a couple of times.

 

I have two 'eating' apple trees, but they are very young and last time I checked they haven't done much yet. I also have about 50 crab apple trees, which are a bit more established. If my apple trees come good, I might have a go at grafting, if only as an experiment to see what happens.

 

By the way, if you just want your own apples, you can strike cuttings from named varieties and grow them on their own roots. The main reason for rootstocks is to control the size of the tree.