Making Trees

Yesterday I attended the Maine Organic Farmer's and Gardener's Association Bud Grafting Workshop and this is my promised report. In the photo above you can see our instructor Delton Curtis grafting a dormant bud of a different variety onto a young apple tree. In the upper right of the photo, to the left of his watch, you can see one that he has already completed and wrapped with tape.

Some background: You may or may not know that all Red Delicious Apples come from one original tree. Apples do not come true from seed. In other words if you plant ten seeds of a Red Delicious Apple you will not get ten trees that bear Red Delicious apples. The same is true of a litter of mongrel puppies or of planting the seeds of one of your hybrid petunias. The results of these breedings will result in a more or less random mixing of the genetic traits of the parents. The "offspring" may or may not resemble the parents.

So how is it that you can go to supermarkets all over the country and buy Red Delicious apples? The answer lies in the art of grafting. Someone once found a seedling apple whose qualities they liked, named it Red Delicious and then grafted the stock of that tree onto other apple rootstock of some kind. Other apple growers have followed. Some of the Red Delicious stock has been grafted onto a rootstock that produces a dwarf tree. Other rootstock may be chosen for its hardiness or its ability to grow in a particular climate. But essentially all Red Delicious stock grafted onto any stock will bear what you recognize as a Red Delicious apple.

If you ask me, the only desirable quality of a Red Delicious apple is that you can bounce them off the floor and leave them on a buffet table for a week and they are still more or less edible and have some crunch. But that is my opinion. Once you start down that road you find lots of opinions and preferences in the apple world. When I first ate a Red Delicious I liked it because it was different from any apple I had had before. So it goes with apples--we all have different tastes and our tastes can change.

There is a relatively new movement among horticulturists to value the varieties of the past. So it is with apple growers--organic or otherwise--and to a growing extent, the consumer. Once you get into the topic you realize that there is a world of qualities and flavors out there that, if you are an apple lover, you want to try and perhaps enjoy.

I remember the crunch and flavor of my first Northern Spy apple. I thought it was the best tasting apple I had ever had. I didn't know that it was also valued for its keeping qualities and lateness but also a little hard to find because it tends toward biennial crops and therefore doesn't put much money in the pockets of commercial growers. I never liked the texture of Macs. Once my dad and I came across a guy who was making cider from his fallen Golden Delicious apples. The apple experts out there might groan at that thought, because they know of many better varieties of apples for cider but for us at the time the cider from a Golden Delicious apple was the nectar of the gods. Many of our preferences are formed by such pleasant memories. I helped a friend find and plant a Grimes Golden this spring because of her pleasant memories of her grandmother's outstanding apple-sauce, which, she claimed, was due to the apples from the Grimes Golden that she had.

I have been bit by the heritage or heirloom apple bug and, as a result, I have looked to MOFGA as a resource. John Bunker has long been associated with MOFGA and also FEDCO trees and seeds here in Maine. He kicked off our class yesterday with a talk which included the information above and more from his own treasure store of knowledge and then turned the program over to Delton Curtis.

Delton is the largest apple grower for FEDCO Trees and clearly enjoys his work. He had an audience ripe for the picking, as it were. We varied from experienced commercial growers to newbies like myself but we shared a sense of adventure, a willingness to experiment and learn and a passion for growing things.

I cannot do justice here to Delton's presentation. It is always great to spend some time with someone who loves his work, is good at it and generous with his sharing of it. Delton is a relaxed and patient teacher. After a tour of his orchard and a demonstration of the technique, we got our hands dirty, practicing with some root and bud stock that he had prepared in advance for us. It looked to me that people were doing pretty good by the end of our time together. Of course practice makes perfect. Delton shared some of his impressive failures with us as well as his successes which had the good effect of increasing our comfort level dramatically. As my father used to say, "Experience is what you have after you need it."

I should bring my post to a close before it becomes book length, but I do want to say that perhaps one of the most enjoyable parts of the day was after our hand's on time when we got to sit around and listen to people talk about apples. Were it not that we all had things to do in our busy lives, I am sure we could have go on much longer. There was a lot one could learn from John, Delton and the other growers there.

For my part, I decided to take a little detour on the way home to pass by a certain old pear tree that I had spied last winter in New Gloucester. I clipped off a couple of twigs, trimmed the leaves off, as Delton had instructed. I came home and grafted three buds to the pear rootstock that I bought from FEDCO in the spring. In twenty years I may have some New Gloucester pears. A good incentive to live a long life.

Working from a book and internet searches only this spring I had tried some whip and tongue and bark grafts using stock from a new-found friend and pear guardian here in Freeport. About half of my grafts had worked, which was not bad, I think. But the best part is that it has left me with rootstock that I can now bud graft.

I have a couple of other pears that I have scouted out. One interests me in particular because it has a very different habit. Most pears you can spot even in winter because they grow very upright compared to the sprawliness of most apple varieties. Though nearly 20 feet tall this tree has a very compact, mounded habit. Its branches also are very "spurry" with short stubby branching twigs making it look almost cactus-like. It is loaded with pears. I will take some to MOFGA's apple day and John's fall workshop on Fruit Exploring, if he does it again and see if the folks there can identify it. For all I know it is the Macintosh of pears. But you never know, it could turn out to be a variety long lost to horticulture. The house where it grows has been sold and there is excavating equipment there. That makes me nervous. This weekend I will be off with my pruning shears and with any luck this variety of pear will live on despite whatever fate lies in wait for this particular tree.

You can see that I have been bitten by the fruit exploring bug.