So helpful, those deer. Kind of like the atmospheric fruit thinning methods that many of us in the NE managed to employ right around fruit set.
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Just noticing this reply now.
They’re round headed apple borers and I’ve done little about them. Better sanitation around the trunk would probably go a long way, but these guys are volunteers in old Timothy hay field long since transitioned into meadow. I’m just getting going on mowing in earnest now, and with so much cool weather and rain, the grass is 4 ft tall. Once they gain enough girth, they’re pretty resilient against a borer or two. I’d consider applying some kind of pesticide though I understand a poultice of gypsum, sand, and latex paint works very well as a mechanical barrier. If I were more on top of things, I’d most likely take that tact at least initially
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Here’s my first ever grafting attempt, the ugliest graft ever. Wickson on Macintosh. My Wickson was on G41 rootstock and snapped off in it’s 2nd year after a dog got too friendly with it. G41 is known for being brittle and I found out the hard way. I hadn’t even gotten a chance to try any fruit and had nothing to lose. I grafted 4 branches and 2 of them took. The other is as bad as this one.
Just shows you the how forgiving apple grafting is. I took scions from my broken Wickson months after it snapped off in the hope that there was still a bit of life in it. My grafting technique is brutal (obviously), and not sure a graft this bad will support a fruit load in the future, but we’ll see how it does in a couple of years.
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I think you just might be in line for The Ugliest Graft Award.
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I think an unusual grafts thread would be good. Hers one of mine, which isn’t so unusual, but backwards.
@SkillCult has this side whip and tongue in a lot of hours videos, but this was my only persimmon seedling and I got one scion from a good friend, so I did a side lap/side whip and tongue on it and it looks really weird but it’s growing!
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So I’m really excited to see this one worked!
I pruned huge rootstock suckers off of a friend’s semi-dwarf tree and then was grafting onto them, I got to the end of my Hall’s Pink apple scion and I saved a chip bud, so I chip budded it into a bud 9 scion and bark-grafted that into the probably Geneva rootstock.
So it should be a free standing dwarf tree on semi-dwarf roots, pretty cool.
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Results of bark and side whip and tongue grafts to top work a bushy flowering crab into a frankentree of high quality dessert and cider apples.
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Was a great year of grafting with probably +98% success, some onto established trees and some bench grafted. Most were grafted using W&T but a few other methods were used when needed.
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Do you mean my ‘fireblight incubators’??? Not funny . . . but 
It’s either that . . . or 
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Roth those look great. I haven’t opened mine yet. I hope they look at least half as good when I do.
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My own pear from seed grafted onto an apple tree. It’s still related to grafting on a apple tree.
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Here is one of the many grafts Dad and I did this spring. Sorry the picture is not the prettiest. It is in a tree tube. I am very excited about this one. It is from an old tree I found along the road in Herman MI, up in the heights of the Huron Mountains. It is a tip bearer, and all the gold blushed fruit on it last October reminded me of bunches of bananas dangling. They were large and tasted great. I went back this April to get scion wood. The mother tree had been split in half during a storm, so I was glad to be able to find it when I did. It is one of two trees I have found up here that was good enough to propagate. I will try to post pictures of fruit from both of them in the future and see if anybody has a guess as to what variety they are.
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I’m sure you have posted this before, but could you speak briefly to your labels? They look awesome!
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The labels are a bit of overkill so hopefully they last a lifetime. My wife has a side business that utilizes a laser engraver (Burnt Orchard Workshop). So I ordered blank anodized metal tags and generate the labels with a combo of excel and word. Hopefully my educated guesses of the harvest times are at least in the ballpark.
I make my own Halloween props so I had this aluminum craft wire around that should work perfectly to hold the tags on while being flexible enough to not choke branches in the shortish term. I’ll still need to maintain them but it seemed a better option than floral wire or string.
Tags:
My favorite prop because why not:
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I have many professionally multi-grafted trees but this year was my first time trying some grafting myself. In addition to swapping some varieties to improve pollination, I also grafted these three new apple varieties. Mutsu in particular seems really vigorous, the grafted scion has put out >2ft of growth on 2 separate buds. I did learn that my grafting tape is a bit too sturdy for buds to easily push through, I had to make some slits to let the bud poke through when it started growing, which was challenging to do without injuring the buds.
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Well done. I also like the use of tags.
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