I've always felt that I needed the good mechanical pull that a budding rubber provides, and to keep it from drying out I think it needs to be sealed with parafilm or wax. Parafilm is my first choice because it breathes a little. But it's not enough by itself to make me feel secure! I used the Ace rubber tape this year on clefts and felt like it worked really well. Rubber tape or bands or rubbers all seem good to me. I think that if you use the wide budding rubbers or tape and overlap thoroughly then the parafilm/wax precaution is probably redundant, but it's cheap redundancy and I do it. I use wide and long rubbers also because it's easier to wrap them off- you have so much to work with, and they're cheap enough that you can afford to cut off excess. Like MiHiGirl I'm in the Rockies, but not at a mile high! We're at 3200 ft, give or take a couple of feet. But it's definitely an arid environment: we get about 12-13 inches total precip per year.

Let's see what you have to work with when the root throws off suckers this spring. If they are small you'll need to wait until they build some girth and strength; otherwise it's just so easy to cut right through them. The first thing I learned to do was cleft grafting, and it's still a go-to for me. It works for a broad range of scion-rootstock size discrepancies. I mean you can have a scion matched with a rootstock the same size or many times larger. But if the sizes of the two are close do a whip or whip and tongue if you like. And I really like the way those meld. Sometimes I fall back on a chip. You can place a chip from a pencil-sized budstick on a stick the size of your thumb without much trouble, and you can do it whether the bark is slipping or not, and regardless of whether the wood is supple and splitting readily. Bark grafting is very, very doable, but I've had a few instances where the branch didn't seem to want to grow over the splice well, and the connection seems a little tenuous. But I have a link to a very good tutorial that will get you going on it. Konrad does a super tidy and precise graft that he has pictures of, too. I don't have the link at hand but he'll provide it, I'm sure, if you ask. Those are all spring grafts. In late summer/early fall you can do chipping and budding. These are designed to heal over in the current year and then emerge the following season. So I don't have an exact answer to your question. I do, however, have a caveat, and that is that I don't know as much about what I'm talking about as it sounds like. There are a number of others who frequent this site who do more, and better, grafting in a few hours time than I've done in my entire life. I'm closer to being a newbie than they are, though, so maybe my experience at learning all these things is worth sharing. Some of the things I try to explain are the ones that I've stumbled over while learning. Good luck! Here is a link that might be useful: Joe Real bark grafting link

Brady, There are fruit nurseries in western WA so I'm sure you can successfully graft there. Of the stone fruits, peaches and apricots are the most temperature sensitive. Plums and tart cherries are more forgiving. I've never tried to graft sweet cherries. In my earlier post I indicated a daily high of 80-90F is the most optimum temperature for peaches. That doesn't mean you can't graft peaches successfully outside that range. It may just mean you just have lower % takes. In cooler temps it also probably depends on how many hours per day the temps are cooler. Here, there is generally about a 20 degree variance between daytime highs and lows, so that a graft done when the daytime high is 75 will experience a nighttime low of, say, 55F. There may be only a few hours where the temp is close to 75F. Peach callusing is going to be very slow for those temps making for a lower probability of success. If western WA has less variance between daytime highs and lows you may well get by just fine with 75F highs.

I'd like to clarify some of the confusion regarding the "fuse-grafting techniques, and training methods that I have used on some trees. I will employ this same method on the fig trees that I have just purchased. I realize that this technique is not for everyone. I just wanted to share this information with you guys. Use it as you wish. "Fuse-grafting" techniques DO NOT involve cutting into the healthy bark so that the cambium layers can be aligned. No wounds are created by this technique so no insects or diseases will enter or infect the trunks being joined. No special follow-up treatments are needed. It is not labor-intensive. Once the stems are joined together, just follow your regular fig growing routines. The mainstems are simply screwed together to create a fatter, and stronger "trunk". The "composite-trunk" will not be weak, nor will they pull apart. The screwheads will quickly be covered over with new bark, and in time, you will not be able to tell that the heavy, fat trunk was at one time, made up of individual stems. This "grafting" will take a few years, and the spaces between the individual trunks will fill in and smooth over with new bark. Your trees will look like a bundle of tied-up cornstalks for a while so be patient. In addition, this method consolidates plant material which would normally be grown in separate containers. I do not have the space to grow individual trees, so I needed to find a way to grow my fig trees in one container. Fuse-grafting to the rescue. Now I'll have three times the plant material growing in one place ... and maybe three times the figs too. I also like seeing trees with short, fat, trunks with lots of taper supporting a nice rack of ramified branchlets. More branches, more nodes, more nodes, more figs. This preference is a hold-over from my bonsai days. Large diameter trunks convey age and endurance. Exposed rootage does too. I like thinking outside the box. I know that this training method might be too unconventional for some, but I'm going to try it out to see how well it works...or, fails. Wintering-over will still be a problem for me. I have an unheated shed where I stored some fig trees over the winter '06. The trees did OK. I'm hoping for the same results with my new trees. I've also read that fig trees can be brought into a heated room to break dormancy about a month before they are ready to be grown outside. For my zone, this would probably be around mid, to late April. I'll try bringing my trees in on Tax Day and I'll put them outside around Mother's Day. I read that it takes about two weeks for dormancy to break and for buds to swell, and, at least another two weeks before the new leaves start suffer from low light. Any thoughts...pro or con?