Apple Grafting 1 - Spring 2025

 2025 Grafting and Planting Project 1

    In order to add pollenizer trees to the orchards on the West side of Ber-Nell Farm, we decided to fill in all of the holes where trees have had to be removed over the years (25 total).  These orchard have always had pollination difficulties since both of the varieties in the front 2.8 acres are triploid (meaning, infertile pollen). Figure 1 below shows the layout of the orchard and the proposed locations for the newly grafted trees.

Figure 1. West orchard replacement plan

    The numbers along the top and left hand side of the image indicate the type of tree in that orchard row (brown for golden supreme, yellow for golden delicious, and red for winesap) as well as the number of trees in that row.  For example, the red 21 immediately above the row that runs north-south on the easternmost edge of the orchard has 21 winesap trees.  Within the easternmost orchard block, where the rows run north-south instead of east-west, the missing tree locations are shown with lettered rectangles.  These correspond to newly grafted varieties as is shown in Table 1 along with other information about the variety.

Table 1. Diploid varieties to be added to the orchard block as pollination partners

    All information in the table came from the Cummin's Nursery website's information on that specific variety.  Varieties were chosen to give full coverage of the bloom season, but also for disease resistance and ability for the apples to store well.  I have never actually tasted any of these, but I look forward to trying each of them in the future.

    The trees were shipped on Monday 3/24/25 and arrived on Wednesday 3/26/25 late in the evening.  They were stored in the farmhouse garage overnight after adding a little water to the bag inside the box.  On Thursday morning 3/27/25, I retrieved the trees and set up my kitchen for grafting as is shown in Figures 2.  The rootstocks and scions after unboxing are shown in Figure 3.

Figure 2. Grafting setup materials

Figure 3. G.890 rootstocks (left) and all bundled scionwood (right).

Table 2. Grafting notes and ID numbers of the form 25G## 25 indicates the year (2025).  G indicates that it is a graft.  The last 2 numbers are the specific ID for that graft (the order in which they were done).

    Table 2 lists all the grafts there were done onto G.890.  The notes got a little spotty in the middle, but a rating of 9 means I noted that the graft union seemed especially good.  A 3 is normal and a 1 is poor.  I also noted when the graft union was offset and whether the roots were especially large or small.  Figure 4 shows the omega grafting process, while Figures 5-9 show the process of completing a whip and tongue (W&T) graft.

Figure 4. Omega graft (left) before joining, and after joining (right top - no offset, right bottom - with offset)

Figure 5. #25G02, Pristine onto G.890, rootstock cut for W&T

Figure 6. #25G02, rootstock tongue cut, note the undesirable crack.  The square wood is for cut protection while making the tongue cut towards the body.

Figure 7. #25G02, both W&T cuts before joining

Figure 8. #25G02, W&T graft after joining but before binding

Figure 9. #25G02, full view of grafted rootstock after joining and binding

    Before grafting, plants were stored in a bucket of water.  After a group of the same scions was finished, they were carefully tied together with twine (see Figure 10).  Bundles were then moved to a wetted mixture of wood chips and potting soil (Figure 11).  The wood chips were purchased that day from Tractor Supply (see Figure 12), although it is probably better and certainly cheaper to use composted chips or sawdust.

Figure 10. View of completed and grouped grafts #25G01-04

Figure 11. View of storage method of grafts #25G-01-07 for the callousing process.  Left image is before bucket was filled to top of the root surface area, right is after.  Fill was wood chips alternating with topsoil.

Figure 12. Wood chips used to heel in roots

    Completed grafts 25G01-25 were placed outside overnight (it was in the mid 40s that night), but moved inside for the next several days as outdoor temperatures were to fluctuate down to the 20s at night and apple grafts callous over best between 50 and 70 degrees F.

2025 Dwarf Apple Pruning Notes

Tree guards are important.  I had two newly installed apple trees from 2024 that I did not get 1/4" hardware cloth protection around before the first snow.  Both of them looked like the poor guy on the left in the image below.  Every tree that had 1/4" hardware cloth wrapped around it looked okay (like the guy on the right) even though the weed control in this planting is poor for now.  The voles got about 6" of material all the way around both unguarded trunks.  It's a good reminder to get these tree guards up.  I just ordered biodegradable spiral tree guards from A.M. Leonard.  I will get these on new plantings in 2025 and report back in 2026 about how well they work.  1/4" hardware cloth is great, but it is also pretty pokey for human hands and allows weeds and (undesirable/too low) baby apple limbs to get tangled.

I tried a new method of collecting scion wood.  Essentially, I grabbed all the clipped branches and laid them neatly in the snow adjacent to the tree from which they had been pruned.  While this would not necessarily be feasible for a semi-dwarf pruning (due to the extreme number of cuts required on a much larger semi-dwarf vs these fully dwarf trees), it worked pretty well for harvesting scion wood from this small planting.  It was a much easier way to keep straight which scions went with which tree (see images below).

Afterwards, I went through and taped up each bundle and wrote the tree number it came from (1-30) on the masking tape.  I took home all of the wood, but in future years, I think it would be better to only harvest scion wood from the trees varieties that I want to propagate, and to neatly pile the rest of it for wood chipping or brush piling later.  The large pieces were unwieldy to transport, and I have more scion wood than I could ever feasibly use.

I processed the bundles en masse over the next two days at my kitchen table (image above) and moved all the non-scion wood into a brush pile in the woods near my house.

I put the rest in a giant dark garbage bag in a bucket in my garage with some wet paper towels, an ice pack, and some ice chunks.  I'm hoping the ice and paper towels will keep it moist in there, especially after taping it up with masking tape, and that the Michigan winter temps of my unheated garage will keep the scions dormant until they can be grafted.  I'll find out and report back during grafting season later this spring.

The deer fence is working.  Note the crazy amount of snow disturbance outside the fenced area in the image below.  

The snow disturbance inside my electric fence is all from me standing or kneeling while pruning.  The snow disturbance outside is all hungry deer, rooting around under the snow looking for a snack.  This is the other reason I took all my scion wood with me.  I didn't want to clue the deer in to the tasty snack on the other side of the electric fence. 

Also, look at the pristine condition of the snow inside the newly fenced kiwiberry area.  You can clearly see my footprints, but no deer have been snacking through these young, establishing plants.  I do not think this kind of electric fence would work without the secondary training wires in the apple and kiwiberry area (functioning kind of like a 3D fence in that the deer cannot tell how far they need to jump to clear it), but I have no counterfactual.  There really is plenty of other easily accessible deer food on the farm, so perhaps they're just ignoring the fenced food that's slightly more work?

I will report in on rootstock propagation efforts. I also harvested some scion wood from trees that had been eaten down to just rootstock (and so the scion wood itself was just rootstock).  I will post next about my efforts to root these cuttings.

5/2/25 update.  Some rootstock were placed into moist soil, some were put in a vase of water.  All had some amount of rooting hormone used.  All failed.  No evidence of rooting on any of them.