Grafting Success

I've had great success with my apple & pear grafting so far this year. I managed to get at least one successful graft with each of the 31 apple varieties and 2 pear varieties that I grafted.  Here's my nursery.

Many are heirloom apples that have survived for 100 or more years with names like Black Twig, King David, Hog Sweet, and Hubbardston Nonesuch, But I also grafted some of the newer disease resistant varieties such as Florina Querina, Galarina, Enterprise, and NY 35 Bonkers.

I'm also having good luck with my limb grafts. These are grafts I've made to an existing tree mostly Antonovka (Russian) seedling trees, a long lived, cold hardy tree that is slow to produce fruit, that I planted 6 to 8 years ago.  I'm hoping that in 2 or 3 years these grafted limbs will be producing apples.

With insects, diseases, and the weather all trying to foil your carefully laid plans it helps be an optimist when it comes to planting fruit trees.

 

 

 

Just a Walk Around the Yard

With the apple blossoms at their peak this week I thought I'd take a walk around the yard and show off some of the apple trees that I'm enjoying.
On the lower side of the house is a Centurion Crab that I planted in 1986 the year we built our house.

In the front yard is a weeping crab.

Across the driveway growing in a ditch is a volunteer crab.

 

In the back yard is a Pound apple and a Snow apple.

Also in the back yard you can see the Emma apple. A volunteer tree that was growing there when I built Emma's kennel.

Down below the tractor shed  grows a Westfield Seek No Further apple tree.

If you walk down into the horse pasture you'll see the Sinkhole apple,

and several volunteer crabapples.

 

On the upper side of the house the Dolgo Crab dominates the view.

So it's easy to see why our bees are so happy.

On my walk I also noticed a Baltimore Oriole across the drive in the "wild" area probably looking for insects.  I'd guess an immature male by his colors.

I also noticed this moth trying unsuccessfully to blend into the house sidling.

 

Thanks for walking with me around the yard. Hope you enjoyed the fleeting beauty of the apple blossoms for all too soon they will be caught by the wind and be gone.