I went through my front field this evening and tied yellow flagging tape to as many of the callery pear trees as I could find. I am not sure I found all the same ones again this evening but I may have found another one or 2! I am going to keep going up there and searching them out and hopefully find more but I am very happy with the ones that I have already found 
I will also start the cleanup in the next month or so and that will also help me be able to see exactly what I am going to be able to do with that piece of my land. I am excited to start this new adventure and hope to be able to take you all on it! 
I am not exactly sure what I will plant there but I know it will have those several pears grafted and that may also set the tone and form of the whole orchard up there.
The weather was a pretty good today after the storms had passed. So this afternoon I was loooking at my pear trees and they are waking up. The weather for the next while looks pretty good so I decided to try a few grafts. I grafted onto my Anjou (2 Korean Giants and 1 Harrow Delight) and my Kieffer pears (1 Harrow Delight and 2 Moonglow grafts). Here are some pics of my cleft grafts. I really hope I did this right and that they take! @Auburn @clarkinks @BlueBerry
Going to try apples in the coming week!
Your grafts look aligned like they should be to me. The only thing I do differently is to tighten the connection down with electric tape. I look forward to seeing the grow and fruit.
@Auburn I will try to keep pics with updates as they progress I was just using these as practice but hope that they take. I am waiting for my rootstock to get here and getting the itch to graft something 
I am very comfortable with a knife blade so it wasn’t very hard to make the cleft, the wedge was a bit more work as I had to go back and forth on some of them to get them just right. I would have one side cut close to perfect and then cut to much on the other side 
so then I had to cut it again. Trial and error is usually my way, so we shall see how it goes I also am looking forward to seeing them grow and fruit!
Great poncho65! I havent tried that type of graft yet. Looks like a really good job. I’m finishing up on peaches in the next day or so, and moving to apples soon. We have one day next week with a low of 27. I dont have blooms yet, but they are definitely at pink. Here’s hoping everything works out ok.
Thanks @Rosdonald for the kind words! I am going on to try apples in the next while and hope it goes as well I still have lots of scions for pears as well. I am only beginning as we are a bit behind you with things up here in Tennessee. We are going to have a few cold nights as well but hopefully the worst of the coldest is behind us
I dont have much in the way of pears, but all this grafting is wearing me out! I have a drawing of my trees and a system (so far) for keeping up with the grafts. Each tree is a circle, and I draw a line on the relative position of the graft on the circle. All my grafts are logged and numbered, so the drawing gets labeled with the number. Some limbs bear stamped tags with the right number, but I found it was just too much to try and stamp all those tags. Scions that have tags get their number circled, which helps to identify relative positions. It sounds much more labor intensive than it is. I wanted some method of identifying with some permanence. If a graft fails, I draw a hatchmark on the line.
Ask me next year if my system helped at all or if its just a big bust 
Sounds like a great way to keep up with your grafts I need to start a chart now before getting to many grafts done I try to be organized but sometimes I fail 
Since I have those apple tree sprouts in pots from the first post of this theead still, I decided to graft some apples tonight in my garage! I still have 3 of the Key apples in pots not grafted but decided to graft something on to the other 16 
I didn’t take pics of my process but I used cleft grafts for all of them. I had scions from a couple sources and still have some coming but couldn’t wait any longer! @BlueBerry @greyphase I hope they all take but if they don’t I still have plenty of scions left and 25 Bud 118 rootsocks about to head my way 
So far I have grafted 16 different apples
- Cox Orange Pippin
- Winter Banana
- Sheep nose (Black Gilliflower)
- Esopus Spitzenburg
- Blacktwig
- Arkansas Black
- Redfield
- Niedzwetzkyana
- Veralma (Simontornyai véralma)
- Red Merylinn
- Wolf River
- Northwest Greening
- Ginger Gold
- Monarch
- Braeburn
- Honeycrisp
Excited to try each and everyone of those and hope that they take!
I am going to try and get some of my callery pears prepared to graft to next (mowing around them for easier access). @Auburn @clarkinks
I also have 20 Bet rootstocks coming with my apple rootstock for pears. Can’t wait to get to those and hopefully if they take I should be able to plant these out in winter/very early spring!
I also repotted an Olympian fig into a 3 gallon pot from a 1 gallon one. It is just now showing a tiny bit of green on some of the tips. I tried not to disturb it much except for a little around the outside of the potting soil. Hope to get a fig or 2 off of it this year.
Need some pics of some of this. I know
You’ve sure been busy, got an idea where all those are going? That’s the blessing of having a bunch of land, room for more trees. (Or is it a curse??)
I got four rootstocks and scions today from the class I went to. I’ll graft them in a few days, and will have to figure out where they’re going. I’m actually running out of good locations to put them, tho.
Did the bad storms last week mess with any of your trees?
@subdood_ky_z6b I have room for most of them now without clearing anything but I started mowing my front field yesterday to make room for the rest of them Lost a pin on the deck of my mower because I was mowing spots that should have been bush hogged instead So i had to stop but I got a good deal of it started and also found several small callery pears as I was doing this! As I continue to mow it, it will get better but then I have quite a few small trees to remove. I am wanting to try to get a lot of this done before snakes start coming out in droves but I may not 
Hope all those trees you have take and you find good spots for them all!
The storms didn’t really do anything here and for that I am blessed and very thankful because others areas close by didn’t fair so well…
I got some pics of my first round of apple grafts this evening You can also see the 2 figs I have potted up right now as well.
Couple close ups of some of the grafts as well
I will hopefully get some rootstock in the next week or so and can graft lots more!
Only 16 of them are grafts, 3 of them are just the Key apple sprouts.
The 2 in the right hand bottom corner are the 2 figs. Chicago Hardy and Olympian.
Here are some pics of the field I am starting to clean up as well. It will take a while to tame it back down and there are quite a few trees to remove but I have a while yet before I will plant anything up there and I can get part of it ready if time prevents me from getting it all finished
So excited that this might become a new place to plant some trees! I have always wondered what to do woth this field. Never could figure anything out so I just started letting it grow up. Wished I had mowed it more and kept it up but mowing is a pretty big job for me anyways It will seem better if I am trying to upkeep it as an orchard though
Just past the trees in the last couple pics is where my current orchard is as well.
Also I found another callery pear down my driveway but it is a little less accessible so I might not be able to do anything with it… I may still try to put a could graft to it just to see what it will do though 
Also when showing my mother my apple grafts, she told me that my grandfather (pa) use to try to graft apples… I guess my love for growing must come from him? He was the one that always had fruit trees and always gardened with his wife (my granny). I learned most varieties of trees from our area from him when I was a boy and he taught me many things about stuff in the woods. We lost him 20 years ago this year. There are so many things I would love to ask him. I am sure in the things that he failed to grow back then he was only getting local information, some of it very good but other info not so much. Or maybe he just didn’t listen We could have figured out how to grow many things nowadays together if he was still alive with the help of the internet! That is also one of the sides of my family that is suppose to have native American blood as well. My red sour cherries are all sprouts from a sprout of the one tree that I have from his sour cherry. He grew grapes and all kinds of vegetables. He also grew tobacco to sell when my mother was young and knew all kinds of stuff like that. I did learn many things from him but wished I could have learned a lot of stuff like that from him. My father in law was a very good friend of his and does know many of these things as well so at least I do have him as a wealth of knowledge for a lot of my questions. Him and my mother in law love to grow things as well and that has also help spark my love to grow things.
Sounds like your grandpa was an awesome guy. I bet you cherish the wisdom he did impart to you. I often wish I could have my dad and grandpa here with me as well, so much I would ask them about. They knew so much about farming. My dad gardened and grew some fruit trees too. I got the farmer gene from him and grandpa.
You are making a lot of progress on your orchard! It is fun seeing things progress. Good job on your grafts too!!
@KSprairie Thank you for the kind words! I do cherish the wisdom he imparted! Sometimes I don’t even realize it is something he taught me until later. When I was young I didn’t even realize he taught me that much but looking back it was a lot!
I hope that the orchard keeps progressing and that the grafts all take
