It's been a while since I post here. I have been thinking about improving the rootgrafting technique. For those unfamiliar with this method, here is a brief summary. You take a small stem of rose and piece of root about same diameter. You do a slant cut on both and align on the side that has a leaf set. Then you try to tie them together or press them together using a peg. Then plant it into a clean sandy medium. The idea is a single leaf set will give enough sap flow down the side to unit with the root piece. The root peice will do teh making of feeder root in teh mean time. This should be done under plastic cover and coolwhite bulbs (indoor) or outdoor in a shade house and misting. Dutch growers use this method to produce plants very quickly for the hot house growing environment. It produces smaller plants, and take longer to maturation so garden rose sellers don't like it.

There are a coupel of major problems with this technique. The first one is the fragile join. It breaks too easily. The second problem is fragile and tiny combium bridge on the side with perfect alignment of the root and the rose stem. It's too small and fragile.

So I came up with an idea to fix both problems. It takes longer to do this banana peel method. I am experimenting to see if it will work. My climate is winter so it's tough. I am putting my grafts in plastic bags (to keep them from drying out) and float them on my aquarium surface to get the warmth and coolwhite light to help them form callus.

The idea here is that the young rose stem has a pretty hollow middle. That allowed the horned up woody center of the root to penetrate deeply to lock it in. The rubber band creates high pressure and friction to bind them together without hindering the growth weeks down the track (rubber will stretch easily). The rubber will break down naturally in a few months.

I am testing this in 2 phases. The first phase is only 2 weeks waiting for the callus to form. After that if it works according to expectation, I will plant them out into the mild winter climate in Sydney either in a little minigreen house for growing herbs.

Any one here who is keen on doing experiments can try to see if you get decent result. It's a bit awkard to do it at first. Make sure you get young rose stems and fairly traight pieces of roots about 4cm in length. The rose stems should have 1-2 sets of leaves. You will need to use sandwich bag or put the grafts into an aquarium glass tank with lids to make sure the humidity is high enough for the leaves to survive without watering.