Experienced grafters please give your input

[Alam]

Hello everyone
I have a question regarding grafting. As we know plants from seed will take many years to fruit and by grafting onto it a Scion from a fruiting tree will give fruits from this seeded plant quickly (I've heard withing 2 years) but my question is the other ways round.
If I cut a Scion from a 1year or two year old seeded plant and graft it to a mature tree of another variety, will the new graft produce fruit within a few years or will it take the same length of time as a seeded plant does since the Scion is not mature. If yes then how many years in comparison.
Much appreciate your own experience. Thanks

[ilya11]

It depends on the variety of rootstock to which you will graft the scion.
For the change from immature nonflowering state, the plant needs to reach a certain volume approximated by the number of leaf nodes.
That is why grafting to the rapidly growing variety will certainly accelerate the time to first flowering. The maturation state of the rootstock is not important for this.

[Alam]

Hello illya11.
Much appreciate your help.
Just to clarify, are you saying a Scion (from a 2year old plant) if grafted to another older tree may flower much faster?

[ilya11]

It does not matter if rootstock is older or not, it is simply should be a stronger grower compared to Scion.

[citrange]

Alam,
It is impossible to be precise about this.
If you graft a seedling on to a strong, fast-growing rootstock then the seedling will probably flower a bit earlier than if it had been left on its own roots. It is generally thought that a citrus seedling needs to reach a critical size before it flowers, and the vigorous rootstock will make it grow to this size quicker. But other factors are important too, especially temperature, nutrition, light levels and length of growing season.
Here in the UK most citrus seedlings take at least 12 years to start flowering. A vigorous rootstock is something like a citrumelo or rough lemon, and you would need one that is itself already several years old. These are virtually unobtainable in the UK, unless you have grown them yourself or you can find a European supplier. If you manage to get one, I guess the 12 years may be reduced by two or three years.
As Ilya says, the actual age of the rootstock does not make any difference, as long as it is strong enough.

[Sylvain]

There is a trick to speed it up. As said before, you use a very strong rootstock and cut all the lateral growths to make a straight plant.
When it reaches 4 m it will bloom. Indeed you need a 5 m green house!...
You can do it in 3 years. Then you take scions from the top.
We saw a picture of this technique somewhere.

[Alam]

Really appreciate your input guys. I germinated 5 lemon seeds (eureka) shop bought this spring as I was curious. Now I have 5 plants about 10cm tall and really don't have the space to wait 12 years untill I see fruit. I guess I could graft onto it other varieties as experiments. Probably get fruit from the scions quicker than the rootstock stems.

[DNoyau]

Lemons are fast growers and it is extremely easy to find seeds (virtually every supermarket-sold lemon has a few seeds in it) if you need to replace them or get more. I believe that makes them a good rootstock for experiments like this, even though you have to account for their relatively low cold-hardiness.