Eric confessed yesterday that he was done grafting for the year (but
this morning that's sounding a little too final). This may not sound
like a big deal, just another farm task completed, but then again,
you've probably never lived with an obsessive grafter. Let's start with
a quick lesson on grafting. In short, you connect a piece of wood from
an outstanding tree on any random tree and that transforms that tree
into an extension of that outstanding tree. Take an apple tree grown
from an apple seed, for example, and you'll get an apple tree that will
most likely produce a fruit not fit to eat. Now cut a twig off a good
apple tree and graft it onto the sorry apple tree and now it too will
produce wonderful fruits. It's an ancient practice, talked about even in
the Bible. While some of Eric's good wood comes from neighbors or a
remarkable tree found growing in a ditch somewhere, he gets most of his
wood sent to him through the mail. Yes, grafting addicts mail each other
twigs! These folks typically meet each other on a fruit forum chat
group. They discuss to exhaustion the pros and cons of all known
cultivars of mulberries, they console each other about the coming
emergence of the 17 year cicadas that could decimate their orchards,
they post pictures of their first blossoms of the year; they are fruit
and nut nuts. And they share wood. Often it's an exchange, you send me
this and I'll send you that. But sometimes they force their favorite
varieties on each other, like a package that arrived this spring full of
seedless native persimmon cultivars we just had to try. In any case, the
6 inch pieces of wood arrive carefully packed with damp paper towels
sealed in plastic bags labeled with names like Rosseyanka, Shinseiki,
and Thomas Myers. They are cut in the winter before the trees start to
grow and stored in the fridge until the trees they'll be grafted onto
are ready. Soon the fridge produce drawers are all taken up with twigs.
A friend suggested we could serve dinner to a family of beavers with all
the wood in our fridge!
In practice, it's interesting, especially when grafting season begins.
First, he grafts onto potted plants to be planted out after the graft
has established itself. At our house, many of these potted plants found
their way into the house "because it's warmer in here and the trees will
be ready to graft earlier." I envisioned delicious Asian persimmons and
accepted, for a time. The other method is field grafting. Here you have
a seedling already established in the ground where you want it, no need
to dig a hole or to worry about watering transplanted trees. All you
have to do is graft onto it. You simply turn a weed into food. Our
pastures and fence lines are full of useless callery pears (with tiny
bad tasting pears like the ornamental Bradford pears) and persimmons and
mulberries of unknown quality and possibly non-fruiting male trees. So
Eric has put wood of known pear or persimmons onto them, marked them
with flagging tape (a reminder not to let the cows graze too close). But
here there is less control as the elements can be hard on the delicate
new grafts. Little tin foil bonnets protect the persimmon sticks until
they get established. Many times a weeks, Eric takes the kids out on the
graft march into the fields. They too can now spew off the technical
terms: scion, stock, cambium, banana graft, bark graft, whip and tongue...
So grafting season is pretty much over. And now we watch as the new buds
swell, turn green, and expand into new branches. Yesterday I was
checking on the bean planting and Eric came over and asked if I wanted
to go look at the nearby Hana Fuyu graft. Jokingly -- although he takes
his grafts too seriously to have gotten the joke at first -- I
immediately responded that I already had. Once the tree begins to fruit
it will be another story: I'll be at least as eager for the fruit as he
is to see his buds grow. Our farm is quickly growing into a forest of
seedless persimmons, and sweet, crunchy Asian pears, thin-shelled black
walnuts, big fat pawpaws, and delicious mulberries. We look forward to
sharing, too.
