Your Small Kitchen Garden is for people who grow--or who want to grow--their own food, though in limited space. We explore how to grow vegetables and fruit with emphasis on expending little effort and energy. Please come share with us in our lazy garden.
This photo appeared in an earlier post where I dubbed my peach tree the year’s overachiever. Blossoms covering every branch resulted in peaches covering the entire tree. The load is simply too much to ask of the slender peachwood branches, so I’ve culled, perhaps, 150 young fruits from the tree.
I’m encouraging people who grow peaches in their small kitchen gardens to kill peaches. It’s already late in the season to be doing this, but if you live in the north, killing peaches now could improve the quality of the coming harvest. Even if you don’t see much benefit this season, you’ll know better when it’s peach-killing time next spring.
Grow Large Peaches
Peach trees can be awesome producers. They are gorgeous in the spring when flowers cover every branch. However, when the petals fall, leaving six-to-ten peaches per branch, it’s a good idea to kill some of those peaches.
Left to mature, a peach-laden tree produces golf-ball-sized fruits. These are as delicious and nutritious as larger peaches, so if you like golf-ball-sized fruits, you can leave them alone.
However, the weight of all these small fruits can stress branches and cause them to break particularly during heavy rain or wind. So, you can protect the health of the tree by removing a whole bunch of peaches while the peaches are very small. Ideally, you do this within a week or so after petals fall.
A terrific bonus of reducing a tree’s peach load is that the peaches you leave behind grow much bigger than they would have had all the peaches remained. Leave only two-to-four peaches per branch, and they’ll likely grow to the size of racquet balls… or even tennis balls. To grow larger peaches, it’s important to do the culling early… the closer it gets to harvest before you cull, the less effect on size you efforts will produce.
Home Peach Growing Mistake
A commercial peach grower once told me: The biggest mistake home growers make is that they leave too many peaches on the tree. You have to be tough and break off all but three or four per branch.
It’s hard to do! When your tree is covered with grape-sized peaches, it’s easy to imagine a bounteous harvest. But I promise when that harvest arrives, you’ll be picking very small peaches. In years that I’ve failed to cull, I’ve used my tiny peaches to make jelly; they were simply too small to bother with in fruit salads and pies.
To provide encouragement for timid peach growers, I’ve made a video to show that I cull aggressively. I wish I’d gotten to it a few weeks ago, but even if I don’t get monster peaches this year, I’m confident the ripening fruits won’t overload and break the tree’s branches.
The forsythia are in their second week, and will be gone within days. They have been particularly striking this year.
To celebrate my first Garden Bloggers’ Bloom Day of 2010, I’ve stepped out of my small kitchen garden. In fact, I’m going to confess something that is completely contrary to my best intentions.
I often express my lack of interest for planting anything that I’m not eventually going to eat. In truth, I’ve planted many ornamentals over the years. My wife has planted far more than many, and our yard is quite loaded with flowers through most of the growing season. Both the landscaping and the maintenance of it are exceptionally reproachable, but the flowers are gorgeous.
The photographer in me has always been a sap for flowers, and our interior décor includes enlargements of many of my flower photos. When I create a Bloom Day post, I usually stick to blossoms of the kitchen garden. Today, however, those blossoms share space with whatever else is busting out in our yard.
I grew a bit self-conscious while taking photos; I realized that I was focusing my camera a lot on what we might refer to as the flowers’ junk. The experience really brought home to me the meaning of the term “garden p*rn,” and I apologize for bringing it up in the first place. My next post will be back on point… I promise.
(Wondering why I’ve spelled “p*rn” with an asterisk instead of an “o?” I didn’t want to give Google the wrong idea.)
My wife has planted many varieties of daffodils, and they are usually the first plants to push leaves out of the thawing soil. They start to blossom as the crocuses wilt. I love the textures on these particularly frilly daffodils.
Not your typical all-yellow daffodil, the orange tinge around this daffodil’s junk makes for some lovely contrast. It was when I was photographing the daffodils that I realized the p*rnographic nature of my flower photos: what normal, young-blooded daffodil wouldn’t find this view compelling?
Among my favorite of all flowers, forget-me-nots are hearty perennials. They also seem happy to drop seeds that speed the plant’s spread through flower beds and into lawns. I adore these annoying plants… in fact, I planted the first forget-me-nots in our front ornamental bed at least ten years ago. My wife has done battle with them ever since.
The tulips start to blossom about when the forget-me-nots do. I’ve shot hundreds of tulip photos dating back to before digital, but these may be the first I’ve ever shown beyond my family photo albums. They look like tulips, yes?
Just squeaking in in time for Bloom Day, the lilacs are opening. A freeze about ten days ago left the tiny buds looking ominously dark, so I’m very happy to see these popping next to the stairs down from our back deck.
Azalea blossoms this early seem so out of place. The white azaleas have always blossomed ahead of the red ones, and this year is not exception. Only a few buds have opened, but in a matter of days I imagine the whole plant will be covered in white flowers.
Clouds against the blue sky, clusters of blossoms portend a decent pear harvest, assuming we’ve already had the final deep freeze of spring. Last year we had frost around May 26. I personally think fruit trees are stupid, given that they break into flower just because we have three weeks of warm weather three weeks earlier than usual.
I planted a Bartlett and a Moonglow pear tree side-by-side two autumns ago. They have both produced gorgeous pink blossoms among purple leaves. I won’t let them develop fruit this season, but perhaps next year they’ll be large enough to handle it.
If anyone in my yard is trying too hard this year, it’s the peach trees. An awesome display of overachievement. Assuming all the flowers set fruit, I’ll need to remove a lot of them while they’re young if I hope to harvest peaches of any significant size.
I love the way a cluster of buds emerges on an apple tree, and the bud in the middle opens… just a bit ahead of the other buds. I hate to see apple blossoms this early, but the bees have been happy. Here’s hoping we get no severe freeze, and the apple harvest is bountiful this coming autumn.
Dandelions and violets are among my favorite weed flowers. They are both exotic beauties that dominate my lawn for many weeks before I fire up the ugly lawn mower and behead them. Spring is an awesome time in a small kitchen gardener’s yard!
This spring’s early start has peach blossoms busting out all over with pear and apple blossoms anxious to pop. When a fruit tree gets and early start, it often loses fruit when more typical weather returns.
Every year that fruit trees have graced my small kitchen garden, I’ve faced an uneasy springtime vigil: Will my fruit blossoms survive?
Fruit trees produce blossoms in response to increasing warmth. By late April, the temperature has usually been high enough for enough days that we get a dramatic display of white, pink, and purple.
Early Spring Kills Small Kitchen Garden Fruit
Two phenomena are particularly distressing to any fruit-grower: a late freeze, and an early start.
While the pear blossoms have held off longer than the peach blossoms, this cluster will probably pop within two days. Meteorologists predict a freeze in two days. Will my peaches and pears survive?
Late freeze—In some years, we see the typical gradual warming that brings on the blossoms in late April. However, with all those gorgeous blossoms on the trees, a cold front drops out of the north and temperatures plummet below freezing.
The opened blossoms freeze, killing the fruit. The kitchen gardener loses out.
Early start—In some seasons, the air temperature rises in March, staying relatively steady for several weeks. Fruit trees react by budding up and putting out blossoms weeks earlier than is typical. If the “unseasonable” warmth continues, there isn’t a problem. However, usually an early start leads to an abrupt return of “seasonal” temperatures. This means sub-freezing nights that can kill fruiting blossoms and destroy hope for a fruit harvest.
Edgy Vigil in my Small Kitchen Garden
During an early start, I can’t help but monitor the bud clusters on my fruit trees. As long as the buds remain tightly closed, even a deep freeze isn’t going to hurt them. When the clusters start to loosen up, I become particularly concerned. Will blossoms pop early this year? If they do, will a nighttime freeze exterminate my fruit crop?
So far, my apple trees are keeping a tight grip on their petals, but the warm weather will almost certainly make them let go in early April. It’s more common for them to wait until late April. That two-to-three week difference could make the difference between a bumper crop of fruit, or a very poor harvest.
This year the vigil started in mid March. It has been crazy warm, and the trees are responding. In fact, my peach trees are in full bloom, pear trees are close on their heels, and my apple trees—the late bloomers of my fruit trees—are threatening to pop. Experience tells me this is very, very bad. Heck, last year we had a killing frost in lat May!
I’m enjoying the gorgeous fruit blossoms, but I’m not happy about them. If Mother Nature blankets us with cold air, there may be nothing to harvest this summer and fall. While I continue my vigil, there’s nothing I can do about the outcome. I don’t need the fruit harvest to survive, so I’ll merely be disappointed if there’s a killing freeze. I can’t imagine the anxiety of a commercial fruit grower when faced with such an early start.
Subscribe to Your Small Kitchen Garden Vlog
Your Small Kitchen Garden blog has introduced a video blog titled Visit with the Gardener, in which I share snippets of what’s going on in my garden and/or kitchen. I try to keep the videos under two minutes and provide either useful tips and techniques – or encouragement – for you to try new things in your kitchen gardens.
Please have a look, and jump over to Youtube to subscribe to my channel. Here’s the link to my channel: Your Small Kitchen Garden Vlog. And here’s an example of a recent post on the vlog. Please enjoy:
By the time I discovered a lone squash flower in my small kitchen garden, it was crusted with ice.
I regret to say: my small kitchen garden was not at all in the spirit of Garden Bloggers Bloom Day this month. In fact, this post marks the annual transition from active gardening season to armchair gardening season: Snow fell for much of the day.
Snow, in central Pennsylvania on October 15th. According to the weather service, this is a new record; there has never been “measurable” snow this early in a season.
My Small Kitchen Garden isn’t Done
As final as a snowfall seems, my garden isn’t really finished for the year. I expect to harvest cilantro at least one more time before leaving the plants to fend for themselves. Cilantro is quite hardy, and the clump of plants in my garden is likely to survive the winter and put out new growth as soon as the ground thaws next year.
The weather service has forecast days in the 60s next week, so I’ll be able to pull plant-support stakes and rake leaves onto the planting bed. Also, there are still carrots in the ground, so I’ll dig those after this snow melts.
Were I adding perennials to my garden or yard—fruit trees, for example—I’d still do so in the next month. Planting perennials in autumn has distinct advantages over planting them in spring. I explained my rationale last year in a post titled As Autumn Arrives Plant Fruit Trees.
It’s also not too late to start “burning in” new planting beds. I explained in Your Home Kitchen Garden blog how to start a garden bed in grass without first removing sod. If you start before the soil freezes, a reasonable amount of decomposition should take place over the winter; you may be able to plant in the spring, with an early summer start being nearly certain.
In any case, there were hundreds of blossoms in my small kitchen garden today… but with a wet snow falling, I had little fun trying to capture images of them. I hope November’s Bloom Day is a little less punishing and I hope you all had way more reason than I to enjoy today’s Bloom Day!
Most of the blossoms in my small kitchen garden are on the broccoli plants. There are hundreds of them, and today they were coated with ice.
This is no longer a flower, but it looks pretty cool. It’s the spent head of a dill plant. This one head scattered, perhaps, seven billion seeds in my garden (that’s an exaggeration), and now looks like crystal with its coating of frozen sleet.
Back in November when I planted them, the roots of my young fruit trees looked a lot like this one. Still, all three tree, two pear trees and a sour cherry tree, are growing vigorously.
Last autumn, I reported in Your Small Kitchen Garden about my decision and subsequent effort to plant fruit trees in the fall. Only after ordering trees from an on-line nursery had it occurred to me to seek customer reviews of the nursery. The reviews I found made me a bit edgy, and I wrote about it in a post titled Aggravation in my Small Kitchen Garden.
Still, I was pleased with the arrival of my order, and with the condition of the plants when I unwrapped them. In a post titled New Pear Trees in my Small Kitchen Garden, I shared the story of planting them.
More Angst About Summerstone Nursery
My post about Summerstone Nursery (the Aggravation post) has drawn a few comments from obviously unhappy customers. I don’t doubt these people have had bad experiences, and I stand by my earlier comments: I suspect there are exponentially more satisfied Summerstone customers than there are angry ones. I happen to be one of the satisfied customers.
Consider the photograph from last November’s post (above, right), showing the bare root of the sour cherry tree I planted then. I imagine a large number of people would say that this tree has no roots; it looks, after all, like a stick. The roots of all of my new bare root trees were similar to this one.
The blossoms on my new moonglow pear tree are a beautiful soft pink. The leaves of the plant are a greenish purple. It will be a bit of a wait, but I’m looking forward to seeing this in bloom once it’s full-grown.
Now have a look at the gorgeous blossoms and purple/green leaves growing from my Moonglow pear this spring (left). The sour cherry tree and my Bartlett pear tree aren’t as sensational, but all three fruit trees have produced new branches and leaves and are growing vigorously. (I have no photo of the sour cherry tree because it’s inside a makeshift tree tube to protect it from rodents and cutworms.)
The pecan trees look dead, but I can’t blame that on Summerstone Nursery: a few days after I planted them, a wild animal gnawed several inches off of each one. My subsequent efforts to protect them from further damage stressed them, and I think they’re not coming back (though I continue to hope).
Summerstone or Not?
Based on my experience with Summerstone, I would buy from them again. Here’s my rationale:
Their prices are low; replacing dead plants at half price is inconvenient, but it would bring the total cost up to what you’d pay for your first purchase at other on-line nurseries.
They have variety that many on-line nurseries don’t.
All my interactions with them have been satisfying.
Would I recommend that you buy from Summerstone? No. Don’t buy from Summerstone Nursery unless you live near them and can pick up your plants in person. Don’t buy from any nursery unless you can pick up your plants from them in person.
You could learn a lot from visiting a nursery or garden store, and when you’re there, you can select specific plants with the help of experienced professionals. The advantages of buying locally in-person are so great that I can think of only one reason to buy plants on-line: Buy plants from on-line nurseries only if you can’t find what you want at a store near you.
My Fruit Tree Prognosis
I’m confident my two new pear trees and my new cherry tree will be fine… assuming I take care of them properly. I won’t be harvesting fruit from them for several years because they’re all under two feet tall. Still, I’m pleased with how this fruit tree project is going.
In a few days, this pod will plump up and provide, apparently, five peas for the pot. It’ll take several dozen similar pods to produce enough peas for a meal.
Do you want to grow peas in your small kitchen garden? It’s a tough question. Peas require a lot of space for a modest harvest. On the other hand, garden fresh peas taste astonishingly better than any other peas you’ll ever eat. If your kitchen garden is space-challenged, there are so many other vegetables that will produce more in the same space as peas.
That said, I plant peas every year. In fact, I dedicate a significant chunk of garden space to peas—about a third of my planting space. But that’s not as big a liability as it seems because pea plants don’t live long. They prefer cool weather and tend to die off as days get hot. I usually remove my pea plants in June, and plant the same area with other vegetables—most often, squash.
Don’t Rush to Plant Peas
If you buy pea seed in one of those envelopes from a seed display in a store, read the package! They can’t print much on those envelopes, so what they do print is probably useful.
One thing you’ll learn is that you can plant peas as soon as the soil thaws in your garden bed. You can, but there’s no need to rush. Peas will sprout when the soil temperature is around 40F degrees, but they won’t grow much until the temperature increases. Give your soil a chance to dry out a bit and warm up. Except in very warm years, peas that I plant in mid-March in hardiness zone 5/6 might mature a week earlier than peas I plant in mid-April… so I try to find other gardening tasks for March such as pruning and grafting in my fruit trees.
Prepare to Plant Peas
When it’s time to plant peas, you must first prepare the soil. Depending on your planting bed, this may be a monumental task, or it may be a non-issue. In my slightly raised-bed layout, I need to walk in the garden bed to be able to till, plant, weed, and harvest. This means that each spring I’m dealing with compacted soil; my vegetables, I know, will be happier growing in loose soil. I feel compelled to loosen the soil before I plant.
The pea plants in this row have just produced their first flowers. I set peas so close together that they grow into a hedge. Notice that the pea trellis runs down the middle of the row – which is actually two rows of plants spaced about six inches apart.
When your planting beds are narrow enough that you can work them without walking in them, the soil remains loose from year-to-year; you can be a “no-till” gardener.
My last three posts discussed soil preparation for various types of planting beds. Whichever style and approach you use, this discussion about planting peas starts where those posts end: I’m assuming you’ve prepared your soil for planting, and you’re ready to put seeds in the ground.
Space Considerations
Peas grow on vines. Pea stems are slender and can support very little weight. So, as the plant gets taller, it extends tendrils that curl around whatever they touch and support the plant. In my experience even “bush” varieties of peas are vines… they just happen to be shorter than typical pea vines.
When you plant peas, it’s important to provide a trellis. This can be a garden fence, a roll of chicken wire stretched above the planting area, strands of twine hanging from above… whatever suits your fancy.
Pea plants I’ve grown reach about six feet before they wilt in the heat of late spring. I built pea trellises that provide support for about 4 and a half feet, so the tops of the plants sometimes topple under their own weight when they grow above the trellises. Before I’d made trellises, I tried bush peas. The package promised 18-inch plants, and I got 24-in plants. Thinking bush I hadn’t provided a trellis, so the plants lay on top of each other. I plant peas densely, so there was a heavy load of plants that trapped a lot of moisture; the plants on the bottom rotted.
The point of the story is that even if you find a short variety of peas, you should provide something for the vines to climb.
Pick Your Pea Variety
I’ve noticed only three significant differences between pea varieties: size of plants, palatability of the pods, and wilt-resistance. We talked about the sizes of plants.
Palatability of pods—if you’re growing peas, the pods don’t matter. You’ll find varieties that claim more peas per pod than others, and you’ll find varieties that claim you can eat the pods, or let the pods mature and then eat the peas. And, of course, you can find snow peas—varieties intended to grow pods but don’t even think of letting them fill with peas.
Wilt-resistance—Pea plants don’t like heat. When they experience several sequential days of temperatures in the 80s and above, their leaves curl and their tendrils shrivel. If the temperatures hold, the plants die. Wilted plants will recover if the temperatures falls, but a mid-spring heat wave can seriously decrease your pea yields.
There are wilt-resistant peas that handle hot days far better than other varieties. Which brings us back to when to plant.
This pea pod sat for a month too long in the produce drawer of my refrigerator. All the peas in it sprouted, despite the refrigerator’s temperature being close to 40F degrees.
When to Plant Peas
You can plant peas as soon as the soil thaws. Peas will start growing in soil that’s above 40F degrees. I’ve had peas sprout in the produce drawer of my refrigerator which runs right around 40 degrees.
If you choose to plant that early, plant the peas deep. I learned this season that I tend not to plant peas deep enough. I planted in late March, and peas I’d left shallow softened up and then froze during a sequence of crazy cold nights. 10-15% of my seeds failed. (That same freeze would probably not have harmed pea plants had any already emerged above the soil… pea plants don’t mind nippy, frosty nights.) In most years, I’ve planted in mid May, and even peas that ended up on the surface because of my carelessness rooted and grew.
So, as I said: if you plant early, plant deep. I suspect my peas would have been fine had I set the seeds ¾ inch underground.
How do I get away with planting peas in mid-May? I buy a variety called Wando. These are amazingly wilt-resistant, and I’ve seen them suffer only in one very hot spring out of about a dozen.
Here’s my recommendation for when to plant peas in your small kitchen garden: Sow directly in the ground from two to four weeks before the last frost date.
How Many Peas to Plant?
A single pea vine may produce a modest single serving of peas. But you won’t get those peas all at once. Rather, as the vine reaches about 12 inches, flowers emerge. The vine continues to grow, and those flowers produce pea pods. As the first pods develop, more flowers emerge higher up on the now taller vine. This sequence continues… but you must pick the fully-developed pods as they become ready or the plant will stop making new ones. Once the vine starts producing peas, it may develop two-to-five pods every three-to-five days. So, you might harvest twenty, thirty, or forty pods from a single plant… but when you harvest the last pod, peas from the first one will be thirty days old.
A pea flower in the dew has inspired many a poet and playwright. OK, I made that up. But pea flowers are delicate and exotic: beautiful harbingers of the coming harvest.
All that to say: you need several pea plants to grow enough peas for a particular meal. My experiences may help you decide how many.
I plant 4 ounces of seed in three doubled rows totaling 42 feet. (I crowd my peas, as you’ll see in my next installment on this topic.) My family of five eats peas at two or three meals a week, and I still freeze around two gallons of peas to eat during the off season. I did some noodling about this some weeks ago and concluded that I harvest about one gallon of peas from every seven feet of doubled rows. Or, for every ounce of seeds I plant, I harvest between five and six quarts of peas.
I’ve never formally kept track, and different varieties of peas, different soil conditions, weather, and garden pests will all affect yield. So, the best honest advice I can provide: plant at least enough peas to assure you’ll have a meal’s worth when you do harvest.
How to Plant Peas
My next post will explain how I plant peas. My approach is a bit unorthodox, squeezing way more plants into my small kitchen garden than the package suggests. You’ll do fine to follow instructions on the pea seed package, or read my next post and get a look at extreme pea culture.
There wasn’t much “structure” to the root systems of my young fruit trees when I planted them in the fall. They’ll need plenty of water as they come out of dormancy this spring.
I’m poised to plant my small kitchen garden, having finished late-winter pruning and grafting in my fruit trees. I’m poised, but holding. March teased early with some very warm days, but then plunged into barely-tolerable cold.
The soil has thawed, so a more rugged gardener could have planted peas, lettuce, spinach, and other cold weather crops by now. I tend to wait until April for those, and sometimes am simply too busy to plant them until late April. But this year there’s something else that’s very important for me to do in my garden: water young perennials.
Fall Planting Time Bombs
Back in mid-Autumn, I argued in this blog that you should plant fruit trees in the fall (this goes for most perennials, but if they’re not going to feed you, don’t waste your energy planting them). I shared my experiences of trying to find fruit trees at local nurseries, I explained that I ended up buying via mail-order, and I showed how I planted my young trees in mid-November.
Among the advantages I listed for planting perennials in autumn: you don’t have to water, and you can omit fertilizer. Dormant plants aren’t demanding.
Come spring, those young perennials emerge from dormancy and require the creature comforts you denied them in the fall. If you had plenty of rain or snow over the winter, your soil will thaw and be moist; your perennials will be happy. However, if your neighborhood is emerging from a dry winter, your perennials may awaken to desert-like conditions. This is especially bad for the young ones.
What’s more, even if your ground thaws wet, you need to make sure the young plants don’t dry out along with the soil. Unless you’re experiencing substantial seasonal rainfall—or massive snow melt—you should start watering when the ground thaws.
How Much Water?
In early spring, water deeply once or twice a week (again, don’t water if Mother Nature is doing a good job of it). As plants (any plants—not just the perennials you planted in autumn) emerge from dormancy (you see leaf buds plump up), increase your watering to once daily unless the soil is obviously saturated.
When you plant perennials, you should soak them till the soil can’t hold more water. This helps you work out air pockets and get the soil up against young roots. Subsequent watering needn’t saturate the soil. Your goal is to keep everything damp, not to maintain a mud pit around your tree.
When leaves emerge and you see vigorous growth, cut back the water to two or three times a week, and keep it up until fall. Skip watering if there’s a decent rainstorm.
Especially if you planted bare root trees in the fall, they need a lot of moisture in their first year to help them develop strong root systems. But temper daily watering: the point of planting in autumn was to reduce the amount of water you had to provide. Especially in March and April, the soil may stay wet for several days between watering.
Fertilizer?
It’s good to provide fertilizer as your young fall plantings wake up in the spring. Best of all, mulch with compost (but don’t let the compost rest against the plant). If that’s not an option, provide a light feed of 10-10-10 chemical fertilizer.
For my older fruit trees, I’d always driven holes in the ground with a crow bar, and then filled the holes with fertilizer. A friend who runs an orchard told me he prefers to broadcast fertilizers on the surface and let them dissolve into the soil. For young trees, just dust fertilizer on the loose soil around the tree trunk—a small handful at most. With all the watering, it’ll soak in quickly.
A makeshift bucket of twigs cut from pruned branches hangs in the green apple tree I’m converting into a red apple tree.
For the past many posts, Your Small Kitchen Garden has focused on grafting and pruning apple trees. Two posts back, we looked at equipment I use to graft red apple stock onto my green apple tree—and I introduced a video that shows me assembling a graft. In the last post, I listed guidelines I follow as I choose which branches will host scions in the green apple tree. This post provides written, step-by-step instructions for assembling a graft. Though I’m talking about apple trees, this technique will work on just about any deciduous fruit tree.
I’ll assume that you’ve been pruning apple trees and have several branches from which to harvest grafting stock. Make scions from last year’s growth. Last year’s growth is at the ends of the smallest branches. Last year was very dry here, so branches grew only three or four inches beyond the previous year’s growth. In wet years, my apple branches have grown a foot or more. In any case, cut and save a dozen or so twelve-inch twigs off the ends of your pruned branches, and put these in a bucket you can hang from a branch.
If there are no fruiting spurs on the section of branch you harvest, you’re probably looking at last year’s growth. If you can spot a scaly ring in the bark, it most likely marks where the terminal bud spent last winter; everything after it should be last year’s growth.
Haul the twig bucket, a gear bucket, and a pruning saw up in the tree and perch so you can easily get both hands on the host branch without falling out of the tree. I like to work on a step ladder which provides a steady base and reduces my need to climb the tree. Standing on branches erodes the bark, and increases my chances of damaging small twigs and existing grafts.
7 Steps of Grafting Apple Trees
Cut the host branch—Make as clean a cut as you can, perpendicular to the branch. Leave a stump just two or three inches long. For very thin branches (a half inch is about the thinnest it’s practical to graft onto), I might use bypass pruners or loppers, but in most cases I use a fine-toothed saw so as not to crush the branch or its bark. With a saw, cut about three quarters of the way through from one side, then remove the saw from the cut, flip it, and finish the cut from the other side. I’ve seen better pruning saws than I own cut cleanly through a branch in a few strokes without a back cut… the quality of your tools will influence your technique.
Split the host branch—Use a sharp knife, align the blade across the center of the stump, and gently rock it while pressing it into the cut end. I try to split along a line that’s perpendicular to the trunk branch from which the stump grows. For a narrow stump, make the split about and inch long. For a heavier stump, it might take a three-inch split to provide enough play to get scions into the crack.
I liked this small branch as the host for a graft; it had a gaping hole in the bark that I was able to remove, and set a graft just blow it. The bypass pruners deformed the stump a little, but I’m confident the graft will take anyway. Notice that I split the stump across the limb to which it’s attached.
Make a scion—Whittle a scion from the harvested grafting stock. Start at a leaf bud three-to-seven inches from the terminal bud of a twig. Whittle a wedge starting at that leaf bud and getting narrower toward the bottom of the scion. The wedge—from leaf bud to the end of the scion—should be about a half inch long (see photos).
Start whittling on one side of a leaf bud, but make sure you leave the bud intact. A finished scion tapers for about a half to three quarters of an inch from the bottom leaf bud down to a chisel point. The leaf bud will sit about even with the end of the stump and will point out from the side of the stump.
Insert the scion into the stump—Spring the crack open and work the whittled wedge into one side of it. The leaf bud at the top of the wedge should point out, and end up aligned with the top of the stump. I use the point of my utility knife to spring the stump open. If you do this, be cautious; when you flex it too much, the knife blade will break. For thicker host branches, I sometimes use a screwdriver to hold the crack open as I insert scions (explained in my last post, Strategies for Grafting Fruit Trees). Make sure the edges of the bark of the scion align with the edges of the bark along the crack in the host stump.
I use the tip of my utility knife to flex the stump open as I insert the first scion into the crack. The first scion usually holds the stump open enough that I can easily insert the second scion. Aligning the bark at this point is crucial.
Add a second scion—Whittle a scion to match the first one and work it into the other end of the crack in the host stump. Chances are, you won’t need to flex the crack open this time as the first scion will hold it wide enough for the second scion to fit. You may need to readjust both scions several times to make sure their bark aligns with the host stump’s bark.
Wrap the graft—I once bought and messed with grafting tape, but didn’t have any luck with it. However, while creating this series on grafting, I learned that you can coat a new graft with wax, then wrap it with grafting tape to protect it from the elements. This requires heating the wax which seems inconvenient, especially on a cold day… but I’ve never tried it, so don’t let my inexperience keep you from finding a better approach.
I use cotton twine and tree wound dressing. Tie the twine around the stump at the bottom of the crack (I use a clove hitch, but any knot will do). Then, wrap the twine around the stump, working toward the leaf buds on the scions, and laying each successive loop of twine tightly against the preceding loop. Get the last loop of twine as close to the end of the stump as you can without running it up onto the leaf buds of the scions. Finish it off by running the end of the twine through a loop, pulling it tight, and cutting off excess twine.
I tie a clove hitch at the bottom of the split, then catch the end of the twine in the first loop or two as I work my way up the stump.
Waterproof the wrap—Use a water-based tree wound dressing, and coat the cotton twine wrapping. Also, dab tree wound dressing on the end of the stump so no wood shows through. It’s ok if dressing runs into the crack and coats the bottom leaf buds on the scions; make sure you coat all the twine and the stump’s split end.
I use a water-based sealant called Treekote tree wound dressing made byWalter E Clark & Son in Orange, Connecticut. Don’t use the stuff to dress wounds left by pruning, but waterproof your graft with it to keep things from drying out while the scions knit themsleves to the host stump.
When Your Fruit Tree Grafts are Done
A successful graft wakes up more slowly than the rest of your small kitchen garden. There may be leaves on the rest of the tree for a month or longer before your scions show signs of life. Usually, the first change appears in a scion’s terminal bud; if that opens up, the graft has taken and is likely to knit up with the stump.
Once leaves emerge, remove the protective wrap from the stump. I use the razor-sharp utility knife to slice part way through the coils of twine without going as deep as the bark. This cuts through the loop of twine I tucked under at the end of the wrap and I can unravel the whole wrap from there. Unwrap gently. Sometimes the twine sticks to the tender bark; if you work slowly, you can unstick it without doing too much damage.
You’re looking at scions set in the split stump of a small branch that conveniently sprouted two seasons ago. This graft points into a space that could really use a low branch. Notice the leaf buds where the scions meet the stump. The most rapid growth occurs around leaf buds, so the design of the graft encourages the scion to grow into the stump.
It’s pruning and grafting time in my small kitchen garden, as it must be for nearly everyone in hardiness zone 6 and lower (north of zone 6). But time is running out. You should stop pruning when the leaf buds on your trees start to plump up in preparation to open, and that usually happens in early April.
My last five posts have been about grafting and pruning. I hope you’ve put the information to use. This post and the next one finish the series. This post presents my thinking about grafting onto an old established tree and the next post talks you through building a graft step-by-step. In my previous post, I described the equipment I use for grafting and introduced a video that takes you through the procedures I follow to graft red apple tree scions onto a green apple tree… so please read that one and watch the video if you want to get started immediately.
Harvesting Stock for Scions
You can harvest grafting stock all winter and store it until you’re ready to work. I harvest stock as I prune in late winter. When I can spend a half hour, I choose a problem to sort out in my red apple tree and take out a limb or two. Then I cut twelve-inch twigs off the ends of the small branches and put a bunch in a makeshift bucket.
If I have a lot of grafting to do, I focus on it almost exclusively until pruning season is drawing to a close. Then I stop grafting and make a mad dash through whatever pruning is left to do.
Graft onto Thin Branches
I like to graft onto very small branches—ones that are about a half inch in diameter. The technique, summarized, goes like this:
Cut off the root branch and leave a stump.
Split the stump across the middle, creating a one-to-three-inch crack.
Whittle a scion and insert it on one end of the split.
Whittle a second scion and insert it in the other end of the split.
Wrap and waterproof the graft to protect it from the elements.
I’ve grafted into branches as wide as two inches across, but a branch that heavy requires one more tool than I usually carry (see box).
Graft to Larger Branches
The grafting technique I use is very easy to duplicate. Other methods require more precise cutting to align scions with root stock. There are special tools available that will cut the end of a scion and a socket on the root stock in which to insert the scion. Using such a tool, you can graft onto branches that are too large to split with a knife.
The technique I teach here works with any branch that you can split across the center with a knife. I’ve had luck with branches up to about 1.5 inches. The technique of cutting off the branch and then splitting it applies as well to these larger branches as to smaller ones. However, when you’re ready to insert scions, a utility knife is too flimsy to hold open the split on such a thick branch.
To deal with this problem, I put a flat-head screwdriver in my equipment bucket. To open the split, I work the tip of the screwdriver into the center of the branch—pointing straight into the split. I keep the screwdriver as far as I can from the bark ends of the opening, and use it as a lever to pry the branch open as I set scions in place (below).
When grafting into a thick branch—this one is about an inch across—I use a screwdriver to hold the split open as I place scions. Here, the scion isn’t all the way into the crack, but the bark aligns well with the bark of the stump. You can see that the scion will bulge out a little once it’s in position.
I cut a selected branch off square about two inches from where it attaches to the tree. I try to preserve the bark at the cut, so I use a fine-toothed saw for thicker branches, and sharp bypass pruners for thinner branches.
In an old, established tree, there may not be many conveniently-located small branches to receive grafts. This was the case with my ugly green apple tree. Knowing too little about grafting, I jumped in and started scions on large branches in poorly-chosen locations. I’d encourage you, instead, to prune your old problem trees for a season or two before you start grafting in them. Pruning encourages new growth, and in the second year, you’re likely to have many small, young candidate branches on which to graft stock from other trees.
Small Kitchen Garden Guidelines for Grafting
Here, in no particular order, are things I keep in mind as I work to convert my green apple tree into a red apple tree:
After three seasons, this graft is coming together nicely; it will probably produce fruit this season. It’s likely that this winter I’ll graft onto the branch that emerges just below the established graft.
Get the tree under control (if it’s not) by pruning according to the guidelines I presented in Prune Fruit Trees – 3: What and Why. If you’re dealing with a serious problem tree, you might put off grafting for a few seasons as you bring the tree around.
Prune before you graft. As you prune, you may need to climb your tree or at least stand on its branches. Worse, when you cut away old growth, it may fall through the branches. This activity could damage new grafts, so finish the season’s pruning on the host tree before you start grafting on it.
In a big, old tree, do lots of grafts. My grafting technique was poor when I started and I’d have about a 50% success rate. So, by doing 90 grafts in a season, I was confident I’d have 45 survivors. If you do ten grafts along a main branch and they all survive, crowding each other, you can prune some off in subsequent seasons.
Align bark. When I tell you that the bark on a scion must align with the bark in its host stump, I mean that the edges of the bark must align. The curve of the scion is tighter than that of the host stump, so the scion will bulge slightly out of the crack in which you set it.
Graft onto short stumps. Leave as little of the original wood as it practical; this reduces the chances of the host tree putting out competing branches that you’ll need to prune away later.
Graft to fill spaces. Especially on large, old trees, look for branches that come off the bottoms of larger branches, and graft onto those. Prune growth that comes off the tops of branches. This encourages the tree to develop a low profile and keep fruit within reach.
Graft to “repair” damaged branches. Sometimes, you’ll find damage on a branch you’d like to retain. Cutting the branch off behind the damage, and grafting into the shortened branch can save it while converting it to some other variety of growth.
Stay alert! Whatever knife you use for grafting needs to be extremely sharp. Don’t cut toward your body parts with it! Especially when you’re splitting a stump, don’t hold onto the stump or its parent branch. Sometimes the stump opens up and the knife slides through with little resistance. I did most of my grafting with only nine fingers one season because I got careless.
Please Chime In
Leave a note if you try grafting this season or if you have experience grafting your own plants. I’m very interested in sharing other techniques, so if you’ve tried some and want to write about them, get in touch and we can work out a guest post or a collaboration.
A new graft in my apple tree awaits warmer weather. With luck, sap will rise from the host tree into the scions and trigger vigorous growth that comingles cells from two plants, resulting in a single plant.
How about a crazy science experiment that you can do in your small kitchen garden? I’m talking about combining pieces from two organisms into a single organism that continues living and growing as if this were a natural chain of events. Make a chimera: graft fruit trees.
Grafting fruit trees is the most exotic, satisfying gardening I’ve ever done. It has extended the life of a useless tree, and nearly doubled the apples I harvest each fall.
Why I Graft
My small kitchen garden boasts six mature fruit trees: three apple, one pear, and one peach tree that came with the house, and a second peach tree we planted when the original fell over several years ago (the fallen tree still produces a good crop of peaches each summer). One of my apple trees produces delightful red apples that are great for eating and for cooking. Another produces red apples that are crisp and flavorless, though they always look great. The third tree produces green blemished, scabby apples that are mostly water and have no flavor.
Last winter’s graft looks messy, though I did remove one scion after they both started growing. As sloppy as this looks, in two more growing seasons it’s likely to smooth out, and in four or five seasons, the branch will be a consistant diameter; you won’t notice the grafting scar if you don’t look for it.
After six years of despising the green apple tree, I was ready to cut it down and make room for a replacement. I had bow saw in hand when it dawned on me: I’d always been fascinated by grafting; here was the perfect chance to try it.
Grafting is Easy
For a project that resembles the work of Doctor Frankenstein, grafting is surprisingly easy to do. It’s easiest to graft onto a tree that you’ve pruned for the past two seasons; such a tree will have young, thin branches ideal to receive scions taken from another tree.
Grafting is a late winter activity, though you can graft as long as your trees are dormant. A graft can essentially drown in sap if you assemble it while the tree is active. When terminal leaf buds become plump and ready to open, stop pruning and grafting.
As a winter project, grafting gets you outside when most people aren’t in their yards. For me it’s a quiet, contemplative time when I meet unsuspecting birds who alight before they notice there’s a human in their tree.
My homemade gear bucket holds bypass pruners, a utility knife, cotton twine, and tree wound dressing. I have a similar bucket to hold grafting stock that I carve into scions as I assemble a graft.
How to Make a Graft: Equipment
It takes me from five to ten minutes to assemble a graft. That’s long enough that I want to be comfortable while I’m working. It takes two hands, so I like to have a stable perch; I usually work on a step ladder. It provides a stable base and something to lean against or sit on depending on circumstances.
To gather stock from which to make scions, I use typical pruning gear (I wrote about it in Prune Fruit Trees – 2). I also use a retractable utility knife, a ball of cotton twine, and a container of tree wound dressing. I carry these in makeshift buckets I cut out of gallon milk jugs. Each jug has twine strung through its handle and up through its neck to encourage it to hang upright from a tree branch where I’m working.
While I’m grafting, I constantly shift gear among my bucket, my pockets, rungs on the ladder, and tree branches.
What, no Grafting Knife?
There are several styles of knives available called “grafting knives.” One style of grafting knife is supposed to be ideal for bud grafting, which I haven’t yet tried. Another style would obviously be useful for the types of grafts I make. Such a knife costs close to thirty dollars. My utility knife cost about four dollars, and replacement blades come in inexpensive packs of 5. Were I to snap a blade on my utility knife each season (I tend to snap one every third year), I’d spend less in 20 years than I would to buy a grafting knife.
If I were developing nursery-quality grafting skillls, I’d invest in specialized tools. There are some clever, expensive devices that will fit scions to large branches, or mate two branches of identical diameters. The technique I use is somewhat primitive, but it works… and it’s a bargain.
If it’s not cold in late winter, it may already be too late for grafting. Given the coldness, warm clothes are useful… but don’t wear garments you like. I’ve slopped tree wound dressing on winter coats, pants, sneakers, and gloves… tree wound dressing doesn’t wash out easily.
Get Grafting
I’ll continue a written discussion about grafting in my next post. In the meantime, I’ve created a video that takes you through every step. The video is nine minutes and 50 seconds long, and includes close-up photos of critical issues. It’s much better information than I had when I started grafting, and it should be enough to get you going. Please watch, and check back here soon for further details and thoughts I wasn’t able to include in the video. Please enjoy:
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