deepsleep
5 year old buck +
Well, originally, the report from my farm was that nearly all of my bark grafts survived, and the cleft grafts didn't. I'm happy to report that over the last several weeks, most of the others have woken up, making my 1st time topworking experiment nearly 100% successful. I was worried I was getting to it too late, as most of the trees I was topworking were in full bloom, but I read a paper that stated the best time to topwork is well after the trees break dormancy. All FWIW. I also had good success on t-buds from last August bud found my success to be far higher on small stock. If the seedling was pinky sized to thumb sized, success was near 100%. Over thumb sized, more like 30%. The t-buds have grown away nicely, and here is one of the faster growing ones. It's from a Siberian seedling which has golfball sized fruit and holds at least until December. You can see I grafted 2 buds to it, and the top one has taken over as the central leader.
I asked my neighbor what his favorite wild apple on his place was, and he had a definite answer, the only problem was the tree had blown over last summer. We collected scions in early March, and bark grafted them onto this 4 yo crab seedling from Coldstream that had pea-sized fruit. They are growing like crazy.
The next couple are bark grafts on potted "Dolgo" planted 5 years ago. The apples are unlike any Dolgo I've seen, with tiny fruit, so I decided to hack them off and try to get something better. I put Mac on one as my dad loves them, and Liberty on the other. Pretty obvious which is which based on DR. The nurse branches have quite a few fruit which I don't mind having. I feel they reduce the vigor of the tree to keep the grafts from growing too much making them a risk to break off from birds/wind.
Thank you to everyone that has provided so much insight on this stuff. It was actually really easy and fun. I did maybe 100 trees and will do another 50 next spring.
I asked my neighbor what his favorite wild apple on his place was, and he had a definite answer, the only problem was the tree had blown over last summer. We collected scions in early March, and bark grafted them onto this 4 yo crab seedling from Coldstream that had pea-sized fruit. They are growing like crazy.
The next couple are bark grafts on potted "Dolgo" planted 5 years ago. The apples are unlike any Dolgo I've seen, with tiny fruit, so I decided to hack them off and try to get something better. I put Mac on one as my dad loves them, and Liberty on the other. Pretty obvious which is which based on DR. The nurse branches have quite a few fruit which I don't mind having. I feel they reduce the vigor of the tree to keep the grafts from growing too much making them a risk to break off from birds/wind.
Thank you to everyone that has provided so much insight on this stuff. It was actually really easy and fun. I did maybe 100 trees and will do another 50 next spring.
