 Happy to be here. For those of you who don't know, I'm Jacob Kelly. I'm a regional extension agent on the commercial horticulture team down in southwest Alabama. So we're the ones getting all the weather and trying to stay dry. But I'm going to go ahead and jump into it. I'm going to be talking about budding citrus today and some techniques we might use for that. So it may be tempting, especially for homeowners to plant an orange or lemon seed after they've gotten a fruit from the store. But this is usually a bad idea because it takes so long for these things to fruit. And the fruit may not be edible when you get to that point, you know, five to seven years. So how long it's going to take for that seed to develop into a plant that can produce fruit. And then you've waited all that time. And it may not be edible. And it's probably going to die because we get cooler temperatures here in Alabama. And a lot of this stuff is not as frost tolerant as we need it to be. So to make up for all this time and to get the best of both worlds, we like to bud our citrus and take cultivated varieties that we know will work and put them on cultivated varieties of rootstocks that we know can withstand our temperatures. And then we're off to the races. I'm going to go over some definitions real quick. So let's talk about grafting and budding real quick. It's the act of joining two cultivars of the same or similar species together to produce a new plant with desired characteristics that we want. So grafting is usually using a piece of a stem or a branch with multiple buds on it as a scion. Grafting budding is just using a single bud with the bark around it as our scion. Budding is our preferred method of choice with citrus because it's easy and quick to do. We can pump out a lot of plants and a relatively short amount of time. A budded citrus tree or any grafted tree has two parts, the scion and the rootstock. Our scion is the above portion of the ground, above ground portion of the tree. That's our selected cultivar. That's going to produce the fruit that we want it to produce. And the rootstock is the lower trunk and roots of this new tree. So we use different cultivars for scion and rootstock to give us the benefits of both. And I'm going to go over some of those cultivars of rootstocks that we use in Alabama on the next slide. But real quick about cambium. The cambium layer is a layer of actively dividing cells between the xylem and the phloem of the plant. This is one of the growing points of the plant. There's apical maristems on the tops of shoots. And then there's these secondary maristems that help the plant grow out wider, like a trunk getting wider. And that's the cambium. Cambium is a secondary maristem. So when we graft a budded plant, we've got to ensure that we get cambium to cambium contact. So that's the cambium of the scion and the cambium of the rootstock have to come in good contact or the graft will not take and will just be left with our rootstock. And lots of those are not as fun to play around with. So rootstocks come in all shapes and sizes and forms. Common rootstocks that we can use in Alabama are swingles, trifoliate arms, Volk or Volkimer lemon and sour orange. In Alabama, we like to use trifoliate arms. I don't recommend using swingle anymore. It's one of the old timers. It's been around for a while and it has some frost tolerance, but it just doesn't match up to the frost tolerance of trifoliate arms. We can get trifoliate arms down well below freezing. And if you attach a satsuma on a trifoliate orange, you've got a pretty frost tolerant plant down to the mid-20s at least. There are two cultivars of trifoliate orange. We have Rubidot and Flying Dragon. Rubidot is our faster-growing, larger cultivar, and Flying Dragon is our slower-growing, dwarfing cultivar. I would stick to one of these two if we're going to grow citrus outside. If you've got a greenhouse, then any of those other options might be a better fit for you. It just depends on what you're looking for. What you're going to need for budding are hand pruners to remove your budwood. Budwood is just wood with bugs on it. Think of it that way. And a budding knife or razor blade. I like to use a razor blade. A buddy tape. It's your polyethylene tape and it stretches. It was originally made for burn victims, but turns out it works really, really well for grafting and budding of plants. And then I like to keep a sharpening device around, whether that's a wet stone or some sort of knife sharpener, so I can keep my blade sharp. And this is so that I can make sure that I get a good, clean, straight cut so I can get that good cambium contact. When we're selecting budwood for our sign, we usually want to collect wood from this season's flush that has just become mature or hard. You'll recognize this by a more rounded stem like that picture shown. The stem's a little bit more rounded. That top one is we're getting into a little bit of new flush. It's hard enough to use though. So you can see there's still some angles on those stems, but between in the inner nodes or between the leafs and buds, it's a little bit more rounded. That's kind of what we're looking for. This wood's going to be harder than the fresh flush. And the fresh flush is going to be quite flimsy and very angular and a little bit harder to deal with. And you're not going to get any take from that stuff, so we want to stay away from it. And it can be budwood next go around. We would like this budwood to be similar in diameter to our root stock that we're going to be budding onto, but a lot of times this isn't feasible. So as long as your bud is smaller than the root stock diameter, you're probably okay. All right, let's get into the dirt. Let's go back to teabudding. Teabudding is preferred by most of our growers because it's easy. You have a high success rate. And we can teabud our root stocks when they are a suitable size, pencil thick or pinky thick, whichever you want. The bark needs to be slipping for a teabud. And that kind of looks like that picture on the left. You can see that bark separated away from the rest of the plant pretty easily. And we need budwood available. All three of these things need to be met so we can teabud. In our area, this is, you know, when you're ordering your strawberries, June, July and the beginning of August, put that strawberry order in, like Dr. Vinson said, and then go hit your greenhouse or wherever and start teabudding your citrus. The procedure goes as follows. We want to collect our budwood, remove the leaves, and keep that budwood moist, sharpen, clean, sanitize our budding knife or razor blade, and make a vertical cut one to one and a half inches long through the bark of the smooth area of a root stock. There's going to be thorns and leaves and stuff. We want to avoid all that and get a smooth piece, like on that picture to the left. After we make our vertical cut, we're going to make a horizontal cut. This can be made at the top or the bottom of that vertical cut. If you make it at the top, it's going to be a true teabud. And if you were to make it at the bottom, it's an inverted teabud. This is all based off of preference. I prefer an inverted teabud myself. You can use the point of the knife to lift the edges of the flaps, like in that picture. I always start from the intersection of the horizontal and vertical cut and work my way away from that incision towards the opposite end of that vertical cut. When the bark is slipping well, when you get into really warm months like July, this should be really easy. Try not to touch any of the internal portions of the root stock or the bud with your fingers, because oils from your skin will likely reduce the rate of success. So either wear gloves or try to grab the bud by the stub that's left over from that leaf petiole when you're moving it around. Try not to get your oily hands on it. After you make your cuts in the root stock, you need to remove your bud from the bud wood. We're going to remove our bud wood by slicing underneath it as flat as we can. We really just want the bark and the bud around it, so you're going to follow through underneath that bud and come up a little bit, and you're still going to leave a little bit attached. Come back with your knife and at a 45 degree angle above that bud, kind of notch it, and it will remove that bud from the rest of the bud wood. That just makes it easier to handle and slide up into your bud cut. So we would do that, maybe a quarter of an inch or a half inch above or below that bud. So we have a little bit of bark on there to play with. We want it to be a flat smooth cut so we can get good cambium or cambium contact. If you scoop that bud out, which I was really bad about when I first started budding, you get a lot of wood behind the bud, and that wood is going to keep that cambium from contacting the cambium of the root stock and everything will dry out, and that's no good. That will reduce your rate of success. So after we remove the bud, we want to insert it into our root stock. If any of this plant material is allowed to dry out, we're going to reduce our success. So we want to slide our bud up in there under the flaps, and if you do everything right, it'll be completely enclosed like that picture on the left there. And then we want to wrap our buddy tape around it. We begin wrapping above or below our incisions, whichever you prefer. The main thing is that you want to ensure that you keep constant positive pressure when you're going around that stem. We want pressure to be the same all the way around, and that's going to secure that bud in place. When you've gone about a half inch above or below where your incision was, you can make a loop and put the top of your tape back through it to hold everything in place. And after you're done, you've just performed your first T-bud graft. So we want to keep everything wrapped up for 14 to 21 days, but really not more than a month. And if you've done everything right, when you remove the tape, the bud should still be green and you should be able to see a very thin, visible callus around the edge of that bud. If you remove this tape too early, the bud may still be green. However, it may turn brown and dry out and die, and then you've got to start back over again. So it's important to be patient when you're grafting citrus. All right, when our bark is not slipping on our root stalks, we need to use a chip bud. And we cut out the bud the same way. And then we go to our root stalk and our root stalk, we're going to do a thin upward cut on the root stalk and then a second cut to make a notch at the top. You can kind of see it there in those pictures. And then we're going to slide our bud up into that notch and it should hold by itself without you having to hold it in there. And then we take the same as we would for our T bud. Like I said, this is better for if I'm trying to do some grafting late August, September, trying to get that last flush from the citrus on some root stalks and things like that. That's a good time to use your T bud. So you can get those last few graphs in there. So after we remove our wrapping and our bud and everything has formed a union, we're going to try to force this bud. Different things cause these buds not to fire off. One of them is apical dominance. Oxen flows with the flow of gravity down from the apical meristem. And it suppresses all buds below it. It keeps lateral buds from growing out. So what we want to do is remove that apical dominance by bending that tip of that, the tip of the root stalk under our bud. We call this bending in the industry and we bend instead of cut because we still want the leaves to collect, you know, they're still solar panels and we still want them to collect sunlight and deliver photo assimilates to our plant, to our bud and roots so everything can keep growing. But we don't want that oxen getting in there and disrupting our bud from jumping out. So after our scion has started to grow four to six inches or more, we can remove that upper portion of that root stock. It's got enough of its own solar panels. It's going to keep taking off. And now we've got our new citrus tree. And any suckers you might see growing after you bend that root stock over, just go ahead and remove those. They're going to be stealing from the bud we want to grow. So we got to take those out. As our scion grows out, we'll need to stake it so we can get good vertical growth. If this is in a container, it'll be ready to plant in 20 to 24 inches. And when we plant, we want to pinch the top or remove the apical dominates again in some way so that the plant can start to feather out and we can get good branching. And then you're off to the races. You can get fruit in as little as a year or two from the bud and after it's growing out and things like that. So that's all I've got on budding. I hope you have lots of success. And if we've got time for questions, I'm here to answer them. And, you know, if you live in Southwest Alabama, I'd be happy to come and show some of my growers how to do some budding on their farm and so they can be successful. And I have to pay so much to get somebody else to come in and do it.