Burning out the bank

My news de-tox ends tomorrow. Many thanks to all of the meme warriors who kept me appraised of the state of the universe.

State-of-the-fleet

One of my children had his car crap-out last week. It dropped into limp-home mode during rush hour. The next day, when he tried to start it, the engine would not stay running. He had to call a wrecker to get it to the mechanic on Thursday. Not a good sign.

He was biking to work on the day it did not rain. The other four days a week he rode the bus.

I offered him the loan of my truck. He accepted.

The irony is that this particular kid is my most fastidious, persnickety, details-matter kid. My truck is not the kind of ride that immediately springs to mind when you here the words "Urban Cool". It is more the kind of truck guaranteed to get you a job the instant you turn into the driveway of a business that does landscaping. 

But it starts and runs and doesn't leak when it rains. It gets 17 miles to the gallon and you can leave the doors unlocked and nobody will steal the granola bars in the center console.

And that left me without transportation. 

I had been catching up on odd-jobs around the house since my wings got clipped.

Yesterday morning Mrs ERJ asked if I wanted to drive Vinnie Van Go* to The Property to do some work out there.

YOU BET!

Yesterday, all I did was graft. I am trying to empty out the refrigerator. In budgeting terms I was trying to "burn out the bank).

I grafted

The mulberries were ripening on the first tree I grafted. They are very, very small. And they are insipid. Any named variety will be a big step up.

 

I put two grafts on that tree. You can see the top of my six-foot tall ladder at the bottom of the frame. The deer will need stilts to get to these grafts but they are still vulnerable to woodchucks climbing and browsing. 

3 Mulberry trees (more than 3" diameter trunks) to Silk Hope mulberry. They are located on the west boundary of the Upper Orchard at roughly 80' intervals.

Grand Traverse on the north tree and The Beast on the south tree. The two hazelnut bushes are monsters!

 4 grafts on two mature hazelnuts, 2 Grand Traverse and 2 The Beast (undoubtedly named after the famous blogger who goes by TB). West boundary of the Upper Orchard. The hazel are side-by-side with 20' spacing.

2 Schlarbaum chestnuts in the Hill Orchard.

1 apple in the Upper Orchard. I was looking for a place to park "a copy" of the late apple we found on Southern Belle's property.

One of the things that slowed me down, besides the ladder work, was having to carve away branches so the new growth will have ample sunlight.

Same as above but zoomed in to make the graft visible

Black walnuts to Howard Persian Walnut. Burnt Ridge sells Howard walnuts and claims that they are capable of surviving Zone 6. I have to admit that seems improbable, but what do I know? I consider it the gardening equivalent of buying a lottery ticket.

As you can tell by the photographs, I am a big fan of marking my grafts with surveyor's tape. I also like grafting after a substantial rain. Every grafter looks like a gifted craftsman when the rootstock is growing like crazy.

In all, 17 grafts and three hours time-on-task. While that seems slow to me, grafting on larger, established trees takes longer (pruning, dragging ladders) but gives you quite a jump on filling the allotted space for the plant. There are a lot of roots "pushing" the new graft. Six feet of new growth on a mulberry graft is within the realm of the possible.

*Not to be confused with Vinnie van Goth (wrong color) or Vinnie (Johann Wolfgang) von Goethe.