Eighty-one F in the shade

Well, I got the cap off of the truck. I got some angle iron bolted on the back of the box so I can slide planks in to use as a tailgate. No pictures. Operational Security and all that.

The cap proved to be made of steel and was as heavy as the wages of sin. I sank some posts and made a buck to hold the cap. I hired Kubota to help me. I backed into the buck and tied the cap off to a tree. Inching forward (after removing all eleventy-seven bolts and shimming it up to break the supervisor tape*) Kubota gave me the sign that my tail-lights had passed the rearmost set of 4X4s. 

I jacked up the trailer hitch to raise the rear of the truck. We slid a 2X4 upwards along the vertical 4X4s and shot four deck screws to secure the 2X4. Then I dropped the jack to lower the azz-end of the truck.

Then forward another 6 feet. Lather, rinse, repeat.

It was stunningly easy after the ground-work had been done.

Today I installed the angle iron and planks.

Grafting

This is stupid. I have been nursing along about fifteen apple seedlings in a 30 gallon tub. The seeds were open-pollinated Novaspy from a local orchard. I know nothing about the pollen-donor except they were successful at whispering sweet, sexy promises into the ears of the honeybees.

Rather than grow out an entire seedling tree, I grafted a length of stem from each seedling into the canopy of a mature Liberty apple tree in my orchard.

Bernie Nikolia of Edmonton, Alberta (Canada) is a fellow fruit grower and he is exceptionally observant. 

He deduced that a variety can be hurried into fruiting by grafting a longer-than-average scion on to a horizontal branch. The scion responds by forcing growth into multiple buds which produces short fruiting spurs. So rather than investing 10 years and 225 square-feet into finding out what kind of apples each seedling produces, I can invest 4 square feet and two additional years.

As long as I graft a long scion on-to a near horizontal branch. Which I did.

I had 10 seedlings with wood large enough (barely) to graft. I marked each branch with an 8" flag of masking tape. It is with great regret that I admit to having pruned off precious, grafted branches in my haste to gitter-done.

One thing you can say about fruit growers is that we always have something to look forward to.

Rain

We got about 3" last night.

The sump pump is running as the crock fills up.

The ground is squishy, the ditches are full and the ducks are happy.

Comments

I want to thank my readers for the quality of your comments.

I think I have great readers.

A recent exchange occurred where one commenter suggested another reader might rely on CNN as their primary source of information. The person who had been accused of such heinous lack of sophistication agreed with the points the previous commenter made he/she could agree with and then moved on.

The accuser did not indulge in the need to have the last-word.

None of us rely on our writing skills for our primary source of income. It is tough to communicate even when we have all kinds of body language and tone-of-voice to fine-tune the message. It is much, much harder when we do not have those advantages.

Thanks to all parties for being classy and giving the others the benefit-of-the-doubt.

* I was recently informed that this is a local term. "Supervisor tape" is the local term for two-faced tape.