6 european grapevine nurseries have tried our new organic grafting wax this summer : Covidai (Rafael Gandia) in Spain, 13 Jul. Plantaze (Mirko Markovic) in Montenegro, Ioannis Politikos in Greece, SC Jidvei (Dan Corbean) in Romania, Kun Sandor (Agns & Sandor Kun) in Hungary and Philippe Borioli in Switzerland. We asked them to send us some feedbacks and photos of the trial, and they filled up two surveys, one after planting and one after digging.
Trial Final Results
We have compiled and compared feedbacks of the different nurseries that compared organic wax performances with usual wax they employ for planting. Here are the results :
Excellent appearance and smell, adherence and elasticity comparable to classic wax
As organic wax is made of bee wax, all nurseries agreed the smell was excellent. They were also very satisfied of wax visual appearance after digging : in fact, a third of them even considered appearance was greater than conventional wax.
On average, adherence as been considered as good as regular planting wax. This property has been better rated before planting though.
At least, some comments suggested to improve organic wax elasticity. This has be taken into account by the supplier who improved wax formula for next trials.
New formula has been developed in 2022
to improve adherence and elasticity.
Success rate are nearly the same
Nurseries had made a good success rate estimation, since they had exactly 59% success rate with conventional wax as predicted after planting.
Organic wax obtained a score of 57%. The main explanation of this difference is that one of the participants of the trial planted very lately this summer : consequently, as organic wax melts with 2 degrees less than regular wax, sucess rate was lower than plants with regular wax, although global success rate was already quite low.
Comparison of organic and conventional wax success rate before and after digging
To be continued… in 2022
In conclusion, all nurseries participants have been very satisfied with organic wax, that seems to fulfill requirements to be a good and natural alternative to microcrystalline wax. All of them want to pursue a new batch of trials this year, this time using this wax at the three waxing steps of grapevine plant production : grafting and stratification, planting and commercialization. By this time, we are eager to know what are the results of first trial in southern hemisphere !