What I found out later and I will tell you now is every apple or pear are different on growth habits and size. A wolf river growing on mm111 gets very large faster than others. Its not all about the rootstock over half of it is about the scion you use. Honeycrisp is medium sized. Haralson is slightly smaller than honeycrisp. None of that is an exact science. A Jonathan and a granny Smith at a neighbors got to 20 feet on mm111 after 20 years of growing. Soil is variable in depth and composition. In my old chicken yard trees grow like crazy.
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Did you do all the grafts at the same time or did you wait a year between the grafts. I did all mine this spring in one take. Hopefully they all take.
Same as you, I did 'em all in one go. In a 2gal nursery pot that first season they grew “OK”. Not as much as M111+scion, but then after being planted out in my orchard they took off like rockets the following year. Good luck.
Planting out my 9 potted apple trees today that I bench grafted over the last 2-3 years, all on M7. I’m spacing them at 15ft, with 12ft between two rows. I’m guessing they’ll be okay at that spacing?
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What varieties?
Suncrisp, Goldrush, Snapp Stayman, Mollie’s Delicious, Honeycrisp, Enterprise, Dayton, Melrouge (red sport of Melrose), and Loriglo (supposedly a darker Jonathan sport discovered in KY). There’s an offset to the rows, so they aren’t directly across from each other. They’re all 15ft apart.
I have older M7 trees (King David, Pristine) on another part of the farm, and they are at the same spacing, and they’re not really close to each other. I’ve done minimal pruning on them, but man they are root sucker machines. My three G30 trees are bad in that way, more than I expected.
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All nine in the ground and mulched. Nice day of work.
On the left row, from close up to back-
Goldrush, Enterprise, Snapp Stayman, Mollie’s Delicious and Honeycrisp.
Right row, starting closest to back-
Dayton, Loriglo, Melrouge, and Suncrisp.
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Looks like you did a great job. I hope they all take and do well for you.
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Thanks, most of them are already 3-4ft high, so hopefully they’ll be productive in a few years. A couple of them have contorted trunks, so don’t know how to straighten them at this point. Maybe tie them to a stake?
Yes, I use different stakes to try to straighten the trunks up. It has worked so far. Do it while they are small and flexible. Later on, in a number of years, they are a LOT harder to try and straighten up. I use bike inner tubes to use to staple onto the stakes to put tension on the different parts of the trees that need straightened.
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Thanks, but the worst ones are 3-4 years old, and have about half inch trunks now, I don’t know if I could straighten them now. I’d be more worried about breaking them if I put too much force on them. My two year old ones are straight as an arrow, and thinner, but I was lax in keeping the older ones in line.
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Deer cages to straighten them? Or to protect them?
For the former, I don’t think I could make that work. For the latter, I’m hoping my dog, whose house looks out onto this area, would be able to keep deer away. Provided he’s not dozing…
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Yah