Adventures in Apple Grafting

Well, I hate to say it, but I've almost set aside the garden for the year. My unwillingness to weed the sunflower starts from the raised beds, and my naivety of thinking they wouldn't get that big has ended in an eight-foot-tall jungle. Luckily for me, the birds love it, I'll consider it not to be a total waste.

I've been able to get some small tomato harvests which is better than last year by a long shot. I don't know if it's the cold nights out here or that I get herbicide drift multiple times during the growing season, but I've always struggled with tomatoes. This year, the wheat fields around us were planted in peas, which may have helped reduce the potential for drift. Either way, we're enjoying quite a few Sungolds, a hybrid cherry tomato that, hands down is the best I've ever tasted. In fact, I have tomato focaccia in the oven as I write. But back to the garden...

Back in the spring, I signed up for a virtual apple grafting clinic through Seed Savers Exchange. For around $100, I received a kit of 5 apple rootstocks, all the tools needed for grafting, and five types of apple scionwood. The clinic was hosted on Zoom, where hundreds of us apple-lovers logged in to learn the art of grafting. It seemed fairly straightforward, and we were told to give the new grafts about a month to see if they successfully took. My hopes were high, but a month came and went, and the grafts gave every indication of being dead. I wasn't totally sure where we went wrong as the process seemed easy, and our instructor had a lot of confidence in the success rate of grafting, even for us beginners. My best guess was that we didn't get the graft notch lined up flush, and there was maybe a small gap between the rootstock and scionwood that dried out. Regardless, I enjoyed the class and had the resources to try again down the road. The rootstock survived, so I figured I'd just let that grow and try my hand grafting with some locally collected scionwood next spring.

Imagine my surprise when Brad came in from weed whacking the garden yesterday (yes, the weeds are THAT bad) to say that the grafts from our presumed failed apple grafting experiment were in fact, ALIVE! Unfortunately, this discovery was after he significantly damaged two of the sapling tree trunks with the weed whacker. It remains to be seen whether they'll survive the encounter, but fingers crossed. I went out and wrapped some spare grafting tape over the wounds. Of five grafted trees, one was weed whacked months ago (rootstock still alive albeit very short now), one graft did not take at all, and three successful grafts (two with recent weedwhacker damage). So that leaves one successful, currently unmangled apple tree. "A" for effort?