Does not play well with others

I dug up 18 MM-106 rootstock. I wore work boots to support my ankle. 13 of the root-stocks were replanted in their permanent locations. Watered in. Pruned. A paper sleeve placed over the trunk to protect them from rabbits until it is time to graft.

I planted kale, turnips and Daikan radishes in the rows to build organic matter. This Daikan looks like a dancer.

My plan is to graft Liberty over all of them. Liberty is an honest Zone 4 winter-hardy apple and is fire-blight resistant. It also ripens mid-September. MM-106 has several flaws, lack of winter-hardiness is one of them. Its lack of winter-hardiness is exacerbated when very-late ripening apples are grafted on top of it. Maybe if I can keep the root-stock beneath the snow line....

MM-106 used to be the most widely planted size-controlling apple root-stock in the world but fashions changed. It now costs about $25,000 per acre to plant a commercial apple orchard. The carrying cost of the debt is crushing and the emphasis shifted to smaller, more precocious root-stocks. They, in turn, drove even more fixed costs-per-acre as the smaller root-stock are not drought tolerant (making irrigation mandatory) and are often not free-standing (making a trellis mandatory).

The point was that I HAVE MM-106 in inventory and that it is a decent choice for a low-input orchard. A little "excess" vigor is not necessarily a flaw in soils with low fertility.

Black Walnuts

Black Walnut roots, we have them...

After planting the 13 apple root-stock I cut down three Black Walnut trees.

Ordinarily, this would not be a complicated evolution but there were power lines involved. Ropes were run. I used the truck to put a little bit of tension on them...a mechanical wind if you wish. 

One tree had a diameter of about 12". One had three stems that in aggregate were about the same size as the 12" diameter tree. The smallest tree I dropped was the one that was closest to the line. I sprayed the cut stumps with herbicide to discourage resprouting and to stomp on the "root-grafting phenomena".

I was heartened to see a Shagbark Hickory (to be confirmed) seedling in the grove of Black Walnuts. I am leaning toward grafting it with a Shellbark Hickory. Size-wise, if a Shagbark Hickory nut is a chicken, the Shellbark is a turkey.

Some people have a conniption when I tell the I am cutting walnut trees. Trust me, these trees are tortured an twisted. The heartwood is only about 6" in diameter which is not economically viable. I need the apples and pears more than I need the walnuts.

Biological oddity

Trees have the ability to "root-graft". That is where a root from one tree crosses over a root from a different tree. As the roots increase in diameter, they can grow together and join the two trees.

That is a problem when a disease like Oak Wilt hits a grove. Oak from the Red Oak clade are more likely to root-graft than oaks from the White Oak clade. Oak Wilt can spread like wildfire through a grove of Red Oaks while it will smolder and sometimes self-extinguish in a grove of White Oaks.

Among the weirdness is that a stump can remain alive because it will receive resources from neighboring trees via root-grafts. Another weirdness is that you can find living roots quite distant from living trees if a grove was cut down and planted to apples. The network of roots stays alive and continues to feed the remaining trees even though their parent tree is dead. The living trees trade carbohydrates in return for water and nutrients. It is a good deal for both. The living trees have a huge network gathering resources with the only cost being maintenance without the cost of capital expenditures. The roots get to stay alive.

So, it is conceivable that one could find Black Walnut roots hundreds of feet away from the closest living Black Walnut. That is one of the reasons why I am making sure to hit the cut stumps with herbicide. I don't need Vampire tree roots killing my apples and pears. As much as it pains me to cut down nut trees, Black Walnut does not play well with others and I need to beat them back, away from the orchard(s).