A map for sure.
These markers will be legible after a year,
sharpie is not reliable for a year.
Or a engraver ./ scratch it on.
https://www.amazon.com/Artline-EK780-Garden-Marker-Pack/dp/B000NJXWEE/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Garden+marker&qid=1612849677&sr=8-2
Edit ,… silvermetalic sharpie last a long time .
The regular black ones fade
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Sharpie does not last, buy Sakura of America Identi-Pen, these do not fade, last for years.
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On your advice I picked up a copy of both of these books. Also looking back at your post, I don’t think I saw a clear direction on what will end up happening once fruit will be produced in quantity on this project. You gave a lot of great ideas for different directions to go (upick, mail order, wholesale etc). I think for something of this scale that having a marketing plan in place for the final product is extremely important. For example, if you are thinking about a wholesale business, you should start making the proper contacts now so that you have somewhere in place to sell later. If you plan on a upick, start planning on how people will check out, buy a scale, get a payment system in place etc. I am excited to see how this project progresses, but planning out your next moves and WRITING down the plan is as important (if not more) than your current steps. It’s ok to change the plan, you just have to start with something to set yourself up for success.
This thread has great pointers on tags. I would recommend your aluminum and sourcing some used wire (copper electric wire) to go with it as @SkillCult has suggested and used successfully. This is the free and simple solution I plan to use. Just make sure you twist the wire tight against the tag so the wind doesn’t rub the hole bigger and eventually cause the tag to fall off. I’ll be engraving mine since I have thicker aluminum scrap.
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In hindsight for myself- Keep them in blocks by rootstock if you can. blinds are slick, i used them last year - the Sharpie didn’t even last the summer - I now have lots of mystery pears. Last year, because write on tags were all sold out, I bought a bunch of anodized aluminum numbered rounds from Forestry Suppliers - I wish I had used them from the git-go in conjunction with a good key.
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I do use a Sharpie…but maybe need to re-think it.
Still, out of 106 grafts last spring…I only have one mystery tree…and it has no tag, not
one so faded
I can’t read it.
{ I do write on 2 sides…for the one facing the sun will fade in 3 to 6 months. }
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I think I will take Olin’s advice in plant similar rootstocks together so that even if I do mix up labels I still know which trees to plant where (also I guess I still have to worry about cultivar size). Since I have so many vinyl tags I might as well make use of those since they’re so easy to work with. I’ll maybe use those fancy markers or if I don’t get them write on both sides like blueberry suggested.
Then I can plant them and make a map. Once I see which ones survive and have more time I can make metal tags from my aluminum. That should speed up the grafting process since I don’t have to make metal tags for all of them. Then I can make new tags when I have more time.
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Many ways to do this ,some work well , others …not so good.
Often I will write on both ends of a tag , blinds , or similar,
So bury the name on one end to keep it out of the sun so it will not fade. Other end can be read above ground.
Other idea …
Put like 25 of one variety in a row , with some sort of good metal stake with multiple redundant tags on stake.
Then another stake, to separate the next variety.
With a corresponding map.
Most trees in my little nursery have at least 2 tags.
Even so , every year I end up with a mystery tree or 2.
I give these to the neighbors.
Many home owners don’t keep track of the names of their plants anyway, so they make good presents.
For me , if I don’t have a name on it, it’s worthless to me.
So use lots of tags …
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I would strongly encourage you to figure out your rootstock questions (including irrigation, support/training and size/manageability) before you start anything at scale. 118, 890, 969 and 106 are reasonably similar. G41 is an entirely different animal, and 214 is also.
Anything of significant size in WI shouldn’t need irrigation, but the dwarfing stock will. I spend a lot of time in southern WI. If your field is anything like the farms I go to, drainage will be a humongous concern. Apple trees really don’t like wet- the roots can literally drown, and if they don’t root rot is still an issue.
I do love to see the Wolf River in any WI planting 
I’m in a similar position: I’m looking to plant 10-20 acres, but I now have years of grafting experience and have learned how best to care for and manage the new trees. My wife and I work together when we graft, I have the tools and the parafilm, she does everything else. LABEL EVERYTHING… nothing is more frustrating than realizing you don’t know what the scion is or whether it’s a fully dwarfing or semistandard rootstock… and once you lose track there’s no good way to find out before it’s “too late” (except that the B118 is your only redflesh apple I see, so you should be able to ID that one pretty easily). The first few years when I started out I had no idea what I was doing; I learned that conventional wisdom is often wrong. Every grafting clinic I’ve ever been to says to use cut chunks of scion, and the new leader will come from a side bud- that advice is terrible, you want terminal buds whenever you can use them (they can easily save you a year on establishment). I’ve estimated that I want trees per acre in the mid 300s, and I don’t want to graft more than about that many trees per year. I’m pretty time-efficient grafting, but it took multiple seasons before I learned to do everything the way I do now.
You really should buy at least some nursery stock to plant a test plot. Those trees will be at least a couple years ahead of what you’re growing out, and they’ll let you make some mistakes on a smaller scale. I can’t stress this enough.
You talk a lot about how your materials costs are “less than a university course”. That’s a pretty silly comparison. That university course will run for one term and end, and you get whatever benefits it confers for the rest of your life, no ongoing labor or cost involved. The cost of buying/collecting rootstock and scion is just the very tip of the iceberg. The labor involved in grafting 1,000 trees is radically more expensive than the components. Even with “free” labor, you’re probably housing/feeding/insuring these people. They probably have limited experience with this, and they will kill your trees, snap off your grafts, and make all the dumb mistakes that every single person giving you advice here also made when we were learning… mistakes you will also probably make.
I think what you’re doing is cool, but it sounds more than a little reckless to me. If you have land, cash, labor and patience to burn, go for it. But farming isn’t about just jumping in with both feet to do something new. It takes time, patience and experience. And money, and more time.
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It is hard to get nursery trees on all of these rootstocks. This is my plan to trial things and if they don’t all make it I won’t consider the time wasted. I will likely plant more trees with less variety after this but I really am not spending much more than time to operate on this scale rather than say 100 trees.
I’m going to plant the dwarves in rows near the house where they can be easily protected and watered. Drainage is not a problem on our land. If anything we have too much sand!
Good advice! I already did this. I’ve been growing ~10 different trees where I want to plant these for about the last 3 years. Some have died and I have learned a lot about how I will plant these ones! If I hadn’t done this I really would have made a lot of mistakes, but I’m sure I have more to make.
I mean the mistake I learn here will also teach me things that I will remember for the rest of my life. I want to spend the time on this and since I am not doing all of the grafts the first year, I will multiple years to try things over. Worst case I cut down the trees I don’t like and do something with the wood.
Your concerns about the “free labor” are really good so I’ll keep those in mind!
Good advice! If nothing else, this might teach me a lesson about recklessness. Don’t worry I’m not spending anything that I can’t afford to lose. Every one of these comments gives me something else to think (worry) about but that’s what I want. I’m sure I’ll come back here in a few years and tell everyone about all the mistakes I made and how I wish I listened better.
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One other note for people following this thread is that my mother is 10x worse than me about “jumping in with both feet”. She was the first (and maybe only) one that encouraged me to do 1000 trees instead of 10. I can always count on her to push me past where everyone else told me to stop and, while that sometimes ends in fire, it has taught me a lot.
I’m not ignoring your warnings. I’m trying to internalize them in the hope that this is slightly less likely to fail.
Thanks again!
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I made plenty of mistakes with $1,000+ when I was your age. Hell, I make plenty now…
I’m glad you have your test plot. That’ll teach you things no book ever could.
Make sure you have a solid plan to support those dwarf trees. It’s MUCH easier to install supports before planting than after.
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The best thing you can do is to treat the rest of your life as if you are still learning, because as soon as you think you know everything, you will begin to fail in ways you won’t realize until it’s too late. The running joke at my office is to hire college kids while they still know everything. As long as you recognize you have much more to learn than you could possibly already know, and you remain humble and learn from your mistakes you should be in good shape.
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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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