Recent content by cavey

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...

If your talking about staking some of the dwarfing root stocks - or staking near the trunk you have to pull stakes or they will root bound or the trunk will wrap the stake and make it impossible to pull - thats if they are staked near the base. It happens every once in awhile. I just try and...

I do so much labeling in the field; (wonder if there are small cordless engravers?). I think I will just use a small softwood board and rounded punch or nail/ nail punch to scribe the label. But I do like these tags a lot. Just looked .... There are a lot of little handheld engravers - cheap

When I first started grafting I would label the grafted trees with a ribbon strip with marker and then after mid summer if they survived I would switch to the aluminum tags ... aften that might get delayed and I had issues with faded markers ... so I went to the best outdoor garden markers I...

My same thoughts on the use of tags, I started with ribbon tape with good markers then went to temp plastic tags then went with the aluminum foil tags then onto better permanent metal labels. I just got burnt by bad plastic imported tags (ordered a huge roll of thousands of tags) that faded and...

cool, I just ordered a 120 set. If they are solid like you show then there going to be better. I hope their not mixing there product tags and that the video is from older style tags and the ones I get are like yours. The fronts looked different from what I have had before but when I clicked...

The ash is gone around here ... the last of it is dying now.