Hi Fruit heads
In the spring I grafted a chunk of May Queen (one if not the favorite of Stephen Hayes, the master pruner from UK ) on to M27. See picture. I just now opened the rubber and the Doc Farwells.
Is there anything I can do to protect it and even goose it along? I am the ONLY one out of MidFEx, a club of 250 fruit heads, to have gotten this far!!! The two small leaves on the right are May Queen!!! I Did IT (so far) !
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Fruit Nuts
Is there anything I can do to goose these two May Queen leaves along?
Looks good. Nice job. I would wait until the tree has a little more vigor to prune off the sucker growth under the graft.
I also added May Queen this spring and was pretty excited to do so after watching Stephen Hayes videos for years. I was looking for May Queen for a while and finally found it (indirectly) from Seedsavers. Iāll have to check the grafts, but I think that I have at least 3 takes, though I donāt think any of them put on a ton of growth.
In terms of goosing it along, I think just protecting it over the winter is the important thing- you donāt want to stimulate much growth at this point. Hopefully it is high enough in the tree that it wonāt be eaten by browsing animals- rabbits can be bad for me, and Iāve heard horror stories about deerā¦
My May Queen, grafted to B-10, bore one fruit. Ripe end of Augustā¦mealy and going south by Sept. 6. Maybe this being a young tree is a factorā¦but though the apple looks like May Queen, this first one surely not a āKeeperā until May.
Delicious flavor, not very complex, so maybe as the tree gets older it develops a ākeeperā quality.?
Crossed most likely to Redlove Odysso, Iāll be planting itās seeds next spring.
I grafted May Queen in spring ā21 and it delivered about a dozen apples this year. They were soft, mealy and, while sweet, any flavor nuance was overwhelmed by their texture. Storage potential was exactly zero seconds. Iām not sure Iāll bother to see if it will improve, since any apple Iāve grown in the past that was this mushy at its first fruiting never improved. Assuming mine is the real deal, it appears to be an apple that wonāt perform well where itās hot.
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Thatās NOT a May queen then. May queen is ripe in October and is a long storage apple.