Sick Patient

Medication

Convalescence

Surgery

Full Recovery

All that in 3 weeks

very nice save...luke

Nice job FMD!

A few questions for you:
Did you use anything other than AL foil to "dress that wound" ?
Is that your usual method of administering fluids to an air-layer?
Was there anything special in that syringe?

Just asking because that looks like a pretty simple solution to a potentially critical situation.

Thanks guys.
The pictures are out of sync because I wanted the narrative to flow.
There were two air layered limbs as seen in the first two pictures- one sick and one nomal. When I took the foil off the sick limb, the soil was a little dry so I injected the second remaining air layer with water. The syringe method is an easy way to do this.
I used Jim's (daygrower's) simple air-layering method of wrapping foil around a girdled limb without use of plastic bottles, baggies or saran wrap. I used potting mix instead of sphagnum moss. You can't get more basic than that...and it worked great. It took a mere 3 weeks to get that root mass. Notice that the majority of the roots grew on the underside of the air-layer. Not sure why.

Frank

what the hell was it sick with?  the airlayer looks like it has the same crap a little farther up the stem.

Don't rightly know what the hell it was sick with, Jason. Perhaps it was frost damage from last winter, perhaps it was age.

You ever have a fig bush where some of the canes just die off and new ones come up? 

The splintering of the trunk sure didn't affect the distal growth as it was putting out all those air layered roots,  healthy leaves and figs. Don't know.

BTW, figured out why the root ball was predominantly on the underside. Duh! 

It is frost Damage for sure.

FDM- Always enjoy reading your humorous threads, thanks. How old was the sick patient in this picture?


Navid.

Is there Anything you can do for frost damage? I read this topic last night and I looked at one of my trees today and saw similar looking damage, but not as bad.

All you can do is keep the young plant at no Lower than 32F trough the winter by having a heat controlled Thermostat that will start a heater,in the shed if Temperatures deep below 32 F,and heat the  shed to no more than 40F.
That sound simple but is not easy to achieve.
Any more than 40 and plant start waking up in the middle of Winter with bad results later in the Spring.
 

This wax on an older tree that I did not cover for the winter. The unknown sal type tree. It grew fine and fruited but it has a spot or two of frost damage.

Navid, the tree has been around for 10 years, sometimes dying back in winter and sometimes not. I planted in a bad spot. The air-layer is going into the protected orchard area.

FMD
Thanks for the description of this simple AL foil method. This is most likely the way I will go when I try a few next season.

December 3 Update:

Delicious!