As a kid, I was obsessed with fruit trees but never really had the opportunity to grow them. Now I’m finishing university and my parents are starting a permaculture thing on 50 acres of land in southern Wisconsin (zone 5a) and I finally have the space and time for apples.
So I’ve collected ~70 apple scionwood varieties from local trees and ordered 1000 rootstock from copenhaven. I’ve done 100s of practice grafts on pear prunings, read a lot, and been to orchards but that is the extent of my experience (besides a few trees I planted 3-4 years ago which are doing alright now). I was hoping to write out my plan and get advice on the process.
I’ve read a lot on this forum but haven’t seen much for working on this scale. I know 1000 is a large number but I look at it as an opportunity to get a lot of practice and I want to plant many more in the future. I’ll hopefully have a lot of volunteer labor for the years to come so I think it will be doable.
Step 1 (grafting): I have my scions in moist sawdust in labeled ziplock bags in a designated fridge. When the rootstocks arrive, my plan is to do mostly whip-and-tongue grafts but a few cleft grafts on the larger stock. Any rootstock I don’t get around to grafting I will plant in my nursery bed anyways and graft onto it next year (some is 1/8" so I anticipate mostly just planting those). That should also give me time to acquire more scions from my wishlist to try. I’m going to wrap the grafts in parafilm and then grafting rubbers and coat the tips with treekote. When do you think the rootstock will arrive? How long do I have to graft onto it? Should I try to chipbud failed grafts later in the summer? Do I need to keep them inside for a while to protect from frost damage (zone 5a)? Can I graft on 1/8"? Will 1/8" be less hardy? What about 3/16" (a lot of them are this)? The rest are 1/4" or greater.
Step 2 (nursery bed): I was thinking 1’ spacing in the nursery bed and then transplanting to the final growing site over the next few years (in the meantime I will be prepping the soil and erecting fences around those sites). Does that sound like a good plan? Do I need to worry about too much sun here or should I just have the bed in full sun? Should I try to build some sort of greenhouse around them? When should I plant them? What is an efficient way to get 1000 trees into the ground? How much should I water them?
Step 3 (preparing the final site for planting): Our soil is very sandy with extremely varying levels of soil nutrients. What advice would you have here? Advice for building deer fencing?
Step 4 (planting on location): We have a lot of those 5’ blue tubes and various stakes. When it is closer to the time of actually planting I will start a new post with all of my questions for that. I just wanted to mention my general plan and see if there is anything I should be considering now (such as starting to collect stake material from our sawmill/local dump). For the dwarf trees I want to try high density and espalier. Any advice for this?
Cultivars (planning to add more and maybe graft over some of these):
Almata
Ashmead’s Kernel
Baldwin
Blue Pearmain
Blushing Golden
Calville Blanc D’Hiver
Chestnut Crab
Connell Red
Cortland
Cox’s Orange Pippin
Crimson Crisp
Daybreak Fuji
Duchess of Oldenburg
Earliblaze
Empire
Esopus Spitzenburg
Firecracker Crab
Flower of Kent
Fortune
Golden Russet
Goldrush
Granny Smith
Gravenstein
Haralson
Hidden Rose (Aerlies Redflesh)
Holstein
Honeycrisp
Idared
Jonagold
Kandil Sinap
King David
Lady
Liberty
Lodi (WAY more than I can use)
Macoun
McIntosh
Melrose
Mother
Mutsu (Crispin)
Northwestern Greening
Opalescent
Pink Pearl
Pixie Crunch
Pound Sweet
Prairie Spy
Red Delicious
Ribston Pippin
Roxbury Russet
Sansa
Sinta
Spartan
Tompkins County King
Twenty Ounce
Viking
Wealthy
Winesap
Winter Banana
Wolf River (WAY more than I can use)
Newton Pippin
Zestar
Rootstocks:
BUD 118
G 890
EMLA 106
G 41
G214 (only 25)
G969 (only 25)
Thank you Scott for creating this forum and thanks to everyone for taking the time to read this and help me out. Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
-Aiden