A Tale of Two Trees

GoldRush apple grafted on G.935 root-stock. Picture taken September 6, 2024 in Eaton Rapids, Michigan

GoldRush grafted on MM-106 root-stock. Picture taken September 6, 2024

The second tree is approximately 25 feet south of the first tree.

G.935 root-stock slightly advance (makes earlier) the ripening of the apples. MM-106 delays ripening. Yet these two trees show exactly the opposite.

GoldRush is usually a VERY LATE ripening apple. October 15 is a typical picking date for this apple and it still needs additional ripening in storage to be at its best.

The second tree is an enigma. It should still be carrying all of its apples, yet most of them are on the ground. By all measures, the tree on MM-106 is at least a month more advanced in fruit maturity than the other.

Most people, when confronted with a situation that contradicts their understanding of how things SHOULD work, discard the observation. Some of us embrace that contradiction as an opportunity, a data-point, toward build a better model of how the universe works.

The one difference between these two trees is that the super-early ripening GoldRush tree has two small branches of G.41 rootstock grafted into it as pollen sources.

Could that be the difference?

If you are an avid reader of first-hand observations of people trying to grow fruit in places like Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta (Canada) then you will occasional run across accounts of growers grafting super-hardy varieties into trees of more "tender" varieties. They claim that grafting a local, high-plains-hardy American plum, for instance, will increase the winter-hardiness of a more tender plum, presumably because it speeds up the tender plum's metabolic preparations for winter.

Like a committee with one very strident member, a tree is a community of cells and a resolute and uncompromising clump of cells can yank the rest of the community far more than the weighted-average of the mass of the cells would leave one to expect.

The grafts are easy to locate. The G.41 is much girthier than the branch it is grafted on.

This winter I intend to prune out the branches G.41 and see if the maturity of the GoldRush on MM-106 reverts back to its expected time-slot.

Is the information useful?

Maybe. Maybe not. It might depend on where you were trying to grow fruit and what varieties you wanted to grow.

If you live by Lake Superior, for instance, and wanted to grow Liberty apples, it might be worth grafting an "accelerator" branch into the tree to ensure the fruit was ripe enough to pick before it froze.

Or if you were a commercial grower and were this close ===>||<==== to being able to ripen a variety that commanded premium prices...it might be worth trying grafting "accelerators" on a row or two of trees.

If you wrote doomer fiction, then it would be a Godsent to be able to "save" your orchard in the event of Nuclear Winter or other, serious climate wobble.

Disclosure...it is likely that there are other varieties/species that are better accelerators than G.41. Truth be told, maybe there are other factors in-play and it is not not what it looks like. I will not know that until I cut out the G.41 and see if the tree reverts back to normal ripening times.