Thursday, April 27, 2017

Mystery scion wood

This is Prima/M7.  I put four grafts of Enterprise on it.
I was grafting the last two apple trees for this season.  I was top-working a couple of varieties that have not been "paying their rent".

I reached into my bag of scion wood, pulled out a stick and made my cut.

It did not look right.

A normal apple scion has wood that is yellow-green.  This twig was lavender-lilac.

That was perplexing.  There are red flowered crabapples that have purplish wood.  I cannot understand how I ended up with scion wood from crabapples when I thought I was harvesting it from between two rows of Enterprise.
A photo from Feb 14. Enterprise apples.
I collected the wood from a commercial orchard.  It was hard to find wood that was large enough to collect.  I ended up cutting much of my wood from prunings that were lying on the ground.  It is possible that the orchard manager had planted a crabapple as a "pollinator" tree in the row but it seems unlikely.  He did not have large blocks of any one variety which would require dedicated pollinator trees.

I tossed the twig and picked another out of the bag.  It was the correct color.

It makes me wonder, how much of the wood I was grafting was not Enterprise.  I guess I will find out in about three years.  It always pays to collect wood from trees you have personally fruited out and verified as correct.  It pays to look at what you are doing and rogue out anything that looks strange before you invest three years in growing it.  Oh, and be sure to label the bag.

1 comment:

  1. Yeah, I am learning the hard way on keeping records on what I plant, too.

    ReplyDelete

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