Grafting the Apple Trees · Sunday May 2, 2010 by Julie
Our small apple orchard was planted with semi-dwarf trees I rescued from Bob’s bulldozer. He’d been experimenting with new varieties, but decided he could make more money selling tulips. I wheelbarrowed the trees to our place, and David and I spent many puzzling hours trying to figure out why stretching a string, marking spots, and planting trees makes such a wavy line.
Over the years, all the trees got anthracnose, a fungus which splits the bark. Some trees are less hardy than others, and a few died. We pastured the sheep under them to keep the grass down and to fertilize the soil. One year, we had a ram who girdled several of the trees before we noticed.
Then, about five years in to the venture, all the remaining trees were suddenly leafy and full of apples. The boys ate the apples off the trees as soon as they ripened, sometimes before.
After the boys moved away, the trees reached full size and productivity. A couple of the trees have apples so delicious that I’ve come to think of the ones from grocery stores as some other kind of fruit, not bad in their way, but not really apples. And some of the trees, the most prolific, have apples so mealy and tasteless that not even the sheep are interested. Our boys must have been really hungry.
A different Bob offered to teach us how to graft good apples onto the bad stock. He cut some scions of Gold Rush and Karmijn for us when his trees were still dormant. Then he left for a few weeks, and as soon as he returned we left, and by the time we were ready to graft it was too late.
“Will you show us anyway?” I asked. Then I saw his expression and amended, “Not because we expect it to work, but so next year we won’t have to co-ordinate both our schedules? Please?”
Bob gave me one of those inscrutable looks, like a kindly grandfather who is tempted to give a scolding but realizes that it would be better to give an object lesson instead. “Julie. It is too late to graft now,” he said. “Are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yep,” I said, pretending not to see his face at all.
“Well then,” he said, and collected his knife, tape, and wax in a marked manner. He showed us how to throw out 95% of the scions because they’re too shriveled, and how to cluck sadly over the remaining ones because they’re not really in good shape either. He showed us how to cut the scion butts into a wedge shape, and slice the bark of the mother plant to receive the scions. Then you wrap it firmly and put wax on anything that will dehydrate.
A few weeks later, I met him at the May Day celebrations. “Bob,” I said.
“Yesssss, Julie?” he asked cautiously.
“You know those grafts? They all took! Their buds are plumping up and some of them have full leaves.”
Bob sighed and compressed his lips. “Julie. I hope you understand something.”
“Yes?”
He sighed again. “You did not deserve this. You did not do your grafting at the right time. By all rights, they should have failed. As long as you understand that.”
