There’s the trick… I write on both sides and one always fades to nothing while the other remains visible. Well until I make stamped aluminum labels that is…
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We have left over tensioners and wire from a high tensile fencing project. We will use black locust posts pounded in with a tractor! Planning to build that this summer and then transplant from the nursery bed to where we’ve built it in later years.
I love this. Don’t worry I get daily reminders of how little I know!
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I like your ambition, and encourage you to give it a shot if you think you can afford to swallow 100% loss. You probably won’t, but better to be pleasantly surprised than bitterly disappointed.
I have a couple of thoughts for you re: grafting. If you haven’t done it before, doing all that grafting is going to be a big chore. I did first time grafting last year, and my measly by comparison 30 grafts took a lot longer than I thought. Make sure you have a system in place to keep things flowing smoothly, avoid confusion, and keep roots from drying out. For example, I bench grafted and moved everything from left to right (the other way works, too) and had a bag of wet newspaper ready to receive the grafted trees. I laid out all my tools in order of use, as well as pre-cut lengths of electric tape. I had my scionwood all pre-wrapped in parafilm and oriented the same direction to avoid grafting upside-down. If I was doing more than one variety, I would pause in between to label the batch or the individual trees. This is what worked for me; what works for you could look wildly different. Just make sure you have a repeatable system and look for ways to minimimize the time between when you make your cut and are moving on to the next tree. Just don’t rush! The system (and a little practice) will provide the speed.
My other thought is to make sure you practice, practice, practice. Get a bunch of twigs of apples, pears, oak, whatever (I found having different hardnesses was helpful) of about pencil thickness, and practice making smooth cuts. Then practice putting two different cut ends together and wrapping the “graft”. Try different cuts, different ways of holding the knife. Find out what works for you. After each one, look it over, think about what worked well and what didn’t and how you can change your hold, your knife, your posture to improve your results. And when in doubt, your knife probably needs to be sharper. You’ll get plenty of practice with your rootstocks, but it would be better to get most of your mistakes out of the way before you have to do it for real. If you do this for an hour or so, a few times a week, for a few weeks or months, you’ll be really well prepared.
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Good advice.
I’ve done 100-200 wrapped practice grafts on pear watersprouts.
Wrapping the scions with parafilm seems like it would make the cuts harder. Thoughts?
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Not really. It’s only 1 layer of a very thin material. The benefit is that it’s already covered in a moisture-retentive layer and it shaves anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes (depending on your skill level) off of each graft from start to finish. You’re just moving those minutes to the setup phase, plus you shave off time fumbling for your tape. I think I got the idea from @marknmt. You could also do a graft then bind then wax dip. Or you could do nothing other than what holds the grafts together, but the moisture barrier helps. Here’s a good discussion of the various techniques and why:
Glad to see you’re practicing already. It helps a lot! I’m only marginally qualified to give advice on this subject, but it sounds like you’re off to a good start. Make sure to look up the various annual grafting threads, as well as questions from beginning grafters. Lot’s of good advice and helpful nuggets hidden in there. It can take a bit of work to assemble it into a system that works, but the nice thing is there’s more than one way to do it. Here’s another good system:
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I use parafilm almost exclusively to hold my grafts together. I wrap as carefully and tightly as I can to seal the scion and stock together, then I wrap up and down tightly to strengthen against the upper and lower parts. For cleft grafts, I also take some strong tape and cinch everything together and then seal with treekote. Parafilm can stay on forever, it will eventually fall apart or stretch off. The tight tape has to be removed, usually by summer once I can see which scion has taken.
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Got them in my Amazon cart tonight, thanks for the tip (no pun)
Yep, permanent sharpie on vinyl blinds won’t last a season. Fades. Been there, done that. Nor cut up pie plates. All ripped off first season. Pencil on vinyl lasted two seasons so far , but the vinyl gets brittle and some break. Definitely keep a chart for a back-up. Embossed Dymo tape on heavier metal strips would work, but I’ve had two embossers fail the first day I used them! Hard to find them any more.
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Thanks, good to know!
No, it won’t.
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Congratulations on your plan and your willingness to work your ass off!
When you are young you believe you can do anything- and sometimes you can.
Hope you have a job with a flexible schedule because a 2 or 3 week vacation is not nearly enough time. Your project is going to be a lot of fun and could make some money too!
We planted 1000 apple trees but never grafted that many. We planted the trees over several years to make the project more manageable. We started with a shovel and moved to an 18 inch auger on a tractor mounted post hole digger. We visited several commercial orchards. read everything we could find, attended commercial apple grower seminars in my state and spoke with the apple PHD several times before we started but many things did not work like we expected
Here are a few thoughts based on our experience over last 8 years
Some type of professional grade grafting tool would helpful for the bench grafts
High quality fence will be required to keep deer and other animals out of nursery beds
Quality labels and extreme focus to keep varieties and rootstock combinations marked
Good weed control in nursery rows but be careful with mechanical cultivation to protect grafts
Need ability to water nursery rows
Most likely only about half of the variety/rootstock combinations will be profitable unless you intend to sell apple trees rather than apples. With some solid research you can eliminate the ones that are less likely to succeed which will simplify the project a lot. Also spacing, pruning/training, and trellis practices vary widely between rootstocks. Its a lot to learn and it must be learned quickly in order to succeed
Growing sellable apples is a different skill set than grafting or growing trees. 1000 trees will require airblast or perhaps mist blower sprayer. Lots of good research on ORMI chemicals for apples but most commercial orchards that are not located in very dry areas find synthetic chemicals are required to produce sellable fruit. A north/south layout may help to prevent sunburn. Probably need drip irrigation which will require at least 5 GPM. Well water is preferred over surface water. Multiple cover croppings of orchard area ahead of time will help control weeds and enhance soil fertility. Careful planning is required. I would describe the level of knowledge required to succeed as masters of science in practical tree fruit production. The establishment cost of one acre of trellis apples is over $15K. Grafting your own trees will save money but the trees are just one of the costs involved.
Edit:
Can you make money? Excellent yield would be 1000 bushels/acre but 700 bushels sold for a good price would still make a lot of money. If you can sell 500 bushels at $20/peck you could gross $40K/acre. Looks good on paper and sounds easy!
Edit2. Just read the whole thread including the the part about grazing the sheep in the orchard and the experiment. Also see you are close to Madison so I bet you could get a ton of folks who would be happy to pay to see your “experiment” especially with the term “permaculture.” If your experiment works well you become the expert and could create and sell multiple 1 day seminars. An old barn on the property would be a perfect location for the seminar. As a general rule agri-tourism is more profitable than growing and selling fruit and easier too since the folks looking for entertainment or education are not as critical about fruit quality and normally spend money freely
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This Rhino embosser works well for me, but it’s pricey. You likely can find it cheaper if you shop around. I use the stainless steel tape, and attach it with stainless wire.
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I think my mother has an embosser that she used to use for her work (vet). I’ll try that before I buy something.
@Stan, the markers came and Im impressed so far! They seemed to be really quick drying, too, which is helpful on outdoor graft markers. Thanks for the tip!
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Hey, not sure where you’re at with this. I just read this thread and actually took notes on a lot of information provided by other posters which is awesome how helpful everyone is. As for keeping the scions, rootstocks, grafts dormant, I use a big chest freezer that I bought on Facebook marketplace for $100. I also bought an inkbird temperature controller which cycles the compressor on to maintain the process setpoint temp. I have it in my pole barn which isn’t heated so I also put a boot warmer/dryer in there and the inkbird controller has a heater output that would cycle it on when it gets too cold. The other nice feature is that since there is no fan, and evaporator drain, it doesn’t dry everything out so the moisture is retained while keeping it cool. Here I have a little over 250 grafts and it works great. When I’m getting ready to plant I can slowly raise the temperature a day at a time before I plant them.
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Update on this project:
Of the 1000 rootstocks, I grafted half and planted the other half to graft in future years. About 90% are pushing good growth but it is a little early to call. At what point can I declare the grafts successful?
I have 70% neem oil that I’m planning to mix up and apply to them on Sunday:
1 tsp oil
1 tsp dish soap
1 quart warm water
Am I making a mistake?
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Good job !
That’s a lot of grafting !
Success looks like …
your picture.
(Right before a bird lands on it and knocks it off.)
Or… when you pick that first apple. That is a sure sign of success !
Why the neem oil, ? Any issues you are spraying for. ?
I have burned some leafs with neem oil. May depend on …type , weather, concentration ?
May do a test spray on a few and observe for several days first ?
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Mostly pests, especially Japanese beetles which will descend on us any day now. Also if it does actually provides some rust protection then that would be an added bonus.
Is this something I should be worried about? Anyone else want to chime in?