Recent content by Oaknut

My rationale for burying grafts is: 1. I am in Michigan’s elk range. I want vigorous trees that will grow out of their reach, and as rapidly as possible. 2. We also have bears. I hope to have trees that will someday be large enough so that bears do not totally destroy them. 3. If voles...

I have always buried the grafts on my apples & crabs, if they are grafted low enough to allow that. But I am only interested in full-sized trees.

Same here.

My two Holy crabs were planted in April of 2022. They were small trees then, but they have been vigorous for me, and they both produced good crops in 2024 & 2025, so I cannot complain. And I had very few crab fruits this past season on my other trees, due to frost. I am glad that I have them.

Holy has a pretty crab, mine are about 1 1/4”, but my trees are young, if age has any impact on fruit size. ? These last 2 photos were on 10-2-25.

Tony, I cannot say. Most were gone by late November, but I do not know if they dropped, or if they were taken. I saw very few on the ground, but that’s no surprise.

My MWDT’s Holy Crabs are still holding on 1/1/26.

I forwarded your photos to a friend who indicates they look similar to both Selkirk & Ranetka seedling red-fleshed fruits that he has.

And Sweet November

And so is Peak Attraction.

Ryan says Lockdown Crab is from Dave.

And I like to prune the the lower branches off pretty aggressively, trying to push them up and out of reach of the deer & elk.

Great questions. Not sure I’m really qualified to answer them. These didn’t grow as vigorously as I had hoped. But it was so darned dry the last half of the summer, that probably didn’t help. Seems like I read somewhere not to remove more than 1/3 of the tree in any given year. But I’ve...

It was aggressive. That ladder is a 6 footer. The trees in those last 3 shots are really struggling, and they all produce 1/4-3/8” bird-sized fruits that drop in September. I took the fences down to work on them, and decided to chop the old gnarled limbs off, and see if I couldn’t get them...

Posted those last 3 shots by mistake. Not sure how to remove them.