2023 tally of grafted apple trees

As I have said before once I retire I plan on doing a bit of backyard orchard’ing for fun and profit. Towards that end this year I grafted about half of what I would probably graft on a regular year in operation (planning on a small operation). I figure this would be a good exercise to test my assumptions.

Heck I finally got around tallying all the grafts:

5x Alma Sweet
10x Centennial
3x Chestnut
3x Diebel
4x Goodland
6x Honey Crisp
5x Lodi
3x Parkland
13 x Prairie Magic
2x Rescue
1x Trailman
5x Whitney
4x Wolf River

64 trees in total! Now the question is how many will take, and how many I will be able to sell. Of those I would like to keep and plant a chestnut, Centennial, Diebel, and Whitney. Some of the others I already have.

So far the Centennial seems to be the overachievers, beginning to push green. The Prairie Magic ones look good with puffy silver tips.

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Must be amazing to grow apples in Alaska. What was your criteria to select those cultivars?

Suitability for the environment. They must be hardy, they must be able to stay dormant through our usual January meltdown (a week in the high 40’s that can be followed by sub zero) and they must be early as our first frost is usually in early October.

Heck some of those do not even mind a hard freeze in the early spring, some will even put up with hard freezes overnight and still keep on ripening their apples. There are a few there hardy to zone 2.

Personally I get very strong winds so apples that hold tenaciously to the tree are a huge plus. A few, specially on the crab side, will stick to the tree through freezing which works great for concentrating the juice for cider.

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You’ve been busy!

Makes sense. Short seasons, temperature swings, wind resistance. Good luck!

If your selling them, make sure you post here. I saw a few I like. Bunch of my trees came from people on here. I find they are far better quality than I get from the mail order places.

Waaaay too busy. By any measurement I don’t have the time for this but I like to test my assumptions. Plans with no testing are worth the paper they are written on.

My goal is to sell a bit over 100 plants this year. That is a small fraction of the ones I plan on moving once I retire but enough volume to identify and correct deficiencies on my infrastructure and procedures.

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I would probably do that. As you can see I have a penchant for the oddballs that don’t get propagated a lot (and trees for cider). That’s another thing I want to test; I could have done a bunch of Honey Crisp, Zestar, and whatever else had name recognition. I want to see if there is a market for the less known varieties.

It’s the crabs I’m after. They are not so easy to find. I agree, don’t waste your time with easy to get varieties. Everybody already has them. I would also go with e-bay.