Recent content by cavey

I have been waiting for some of my younger trees to start hanging fruit.... My first Whitney crab apple taste test (good flavor - a little soft, being a crab I thought it would be crunchy) then I had the surprise --- I did not remember grafting black berries onto the tree. I had to do a...

I made a wire cloth cage for drying them out - it was close to 4x8 and worked like a suit case - that would have worked had I still had the thing.

I saw a video of a guy taking whole nuts husks and all - dumping them into a bucket and filling with water - electric power drill and a plaster mixer and just blend away, goes slow at first then the husks just shred off leaving the nuts. Its crazy how strong the nuts are.... I seen vids of...

Years ago, I made drying cages for them then just direct planted them with very little luck. On a whim here yesterday i saw them dropping- and having two BW trees in the back yard I grabbed a wheel barrow half full of them. Looked up on google "how to" and decided to give this a try. I will...

My tip of the day, for those of you that want to try and harvest black walnuts to plant in the spring - just buy seedlings.... I've done seeds from oaks, I have done others as well - and I knew walnuts can stain. I was wearing rubber gloves but they had a tear or two. The nuts were still green...

Waiting on trailman for a taste test, but I have always loved my chestnut crabs !

Definitely with softwood planting - especially with hand spade planting - no point in trying to plant if the roots are bigger than the hole and your bunching them up at the bottom. I have a softwood planting spade that is smaller and built for speed and a larger hardwood spade that makes a...

Give it a shot !

I like your way of thinking, my goal is food sources 24/7/365 with apples and crabs helping from fall to late winter. What you said makes good sense - chestnut crab is one of my favorite to eat ... I have trailman and kerr in waiting for them to produce cant wait to try them.

I think your right, I have a number of zone 5 trees that I tried - and I believe they are on B118 RS which I have now gone away from ... none (Kingstons) have done well - they are stunted and have trunk issues - just have not behaved well. My scion may have had some disease issues. I noticed...

I think we are talking perfect worlds and times here.... if you had a vigorous, large apple, frost immune annual producer that dropped perfectly disease resistant high sugar content fruit for your UDSA zone around the time your in the stand that would not rot quickly on the ground I would go...

I bumped something on the key board and it posted so forgive the typos - but yes I need to do an update. Thanks for the bump and reminder to post. I need to do an inventory and make notes so this is a good excuse to do that. I got out and pruned every tree I have on the main farm this spring. I...

Thats a good question, I was out moving a handful of apple trees this prior week. Pulling trees from my nursery trying to reclaim what was once my garden out at the farm. Transplanting them in the few spaces i have left open. Im far less technical than a few on here, I hoarded a bunch of scion...

I've gone away from B118 and gone back to my original Anty's for root stock - they have been pretty much bullet proof rootstock for me.

Been there as well, hard lesson to learn - heart breaker to have a mature tree(s) get girdled - I keep the screen on as long as I can, one the tree gets too big, I flip the screen sideways and put it back on the larger trunk. It doesnt have the height of protection it once gave but I find that...