Grafting lessons
I finished up the last
of the grafting and pruning Wednesday when another round of scionwood
came in the mail. The
first pear I frameworked last week has been converted to
Seckel, but I frameworked the second pear with two separate
varieties. One was Comice and the other was described as follows:
(How could I turn
something like that down?)
Meanwhile, I changed two
other trees into fruit
cocktail trees by
grafting a new variety onto one limb apiece. Both trees were
already pretty big, so I don't know how tough it'll be to make sure the
newly grafted twigs have adequate growing area, especially since I
added a plum limb to a peach in one case. (I had swapped for plum
scionwood thinking I'd add it to 
my
Methley plum, but she's ailing and might get yanked out, and I didn't
want the scionwood to go to waste.)
Here's what I learned
during my grafting afternoon:
- Slowly but surely, I'm getting better at making the right
cuts. It is tougher to
graft onto a tree in the ground than to bench graft, though.
- Grafting knives are sharp! See bandaid. (Don't worry, Mom, it's only the equivalent of a paper cut.)
- Parafilm grafting tape is easiest to use if you prestretch it before starting to bind your grafting wound.
- Trowbridge's
grafting wax is excellent around a little cleft graft and not bad
on the tips of scionwood.
Now I just have to
pretend to be patient until everything starts to leaf out.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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