Here in Maine we’re expecting 1-2 feet of snow over the next 36 hours, so as a coping mechanism I’m thinking about the trees I want to plant in the spring. I’ve read some of the threads here on interstems, and my friend Holly down in MA (who intro’d me to this forum) has used them for the espaliered trees in his backyard orchard with mixed success, but it would be great if folks have specific advice or experience to share.
By way of background, over about 10 years I’ve planted an acre of apple trees on a (bridge-connected) island in the midcoast region of Maine (z5b). The site is an old farm of mostly ledge and swamp, with some pockets of decent soil where my mom and grandfather grew apples, pears, berries, and vegetables. Twelve years ago Holly and I started making cider every fall; fortunately at the time my wife and I lived very close to Poverty Lane/Farnum Hill in New Hampshire, so we had access to an amazing assortment of Old and New World cider varieties, as well as bits of advice from Steve Wood and his crew. In the years since, we’ve refined a system of bicycle-powered equipment that cranks out serious quantities of cider so long as we have plenty of folks to pedal. Last fall we processed four 15-bushel bins in a day, and made over 200 gallons of fresh cider. (We don’t ferment it all; most of it goes home sweet with the pedalers.)
To feed this habit with apples, about 10 years ago I started an orchard on the land where I grew up, clearing a NW-facing acre of mixed second-growth trees over a few years and planting a wide assortment of varieties we’d come to use for our cider. My nursery stock came from our local co-op, Fedco, which back then sold everything on Antonovka seedling rootstock. Per Fedco advice (at the time they were saying 25-30’ spacing), I planted in rows 30’ with 28’ in-row spacing. The trees grew well but it was clear that they were going to take a long time to fill in the rows. So I started planting peach trees between the apples in the rows, which has worked well as the peaches seem sort of disposable - they grow fast, fruit young, and die unexpectedly, often with weird rubbery jelly coming out of the bark in places (which I take to be some kind of fungus). The foggy marine climate seems to hold the flowers back in the spring so they don’t get zapped by frost so often; on the other hand the later varieties don’t always ripen by fall; the best one for us has been an early one Fedco calls Lars Anderson.
Along the way I took a grafting class at MOFGA taught by Delton Curtis (who grafts many of Fedco’s trees) and got to where I could reliably whip-and-tongue or bark-graft apples, and summer T-bud peaches (though not vice-versa). We haven’t had a lot of problems with pests; occasionally voles get behind the wraps, and borers are a constant battle, but with vigilance we haven’t lost more than a tree or two. Pollination is more of a challenge, with long winters and most of the island grown up to forest, it’s hard to keep bees alive; I’ve taken to planting buckwheat between some of the rows and hope to do better with bees in the future. I haven’t started spraying, but now that we’re getting fruit of course it’s wormy; we don’t care as much since it’s going for cider, but I would like to get reasonably clean fruit, so I suspect this spring or next I’ll be looking for advice on spray regimens.
I started with seedling rootstock under the influence of Fedco, and because I liked the longevity and robustness of the full-sized trees, but the first batch are just now coming into bearing, and we aren’t getting a ton of fruit yet. So having crossed the 40yrs benchmark, I’m inclined to try some modern rootstocks to see if we can get more fruit sooner - as much as we love making the pilgrimage back to Poverty Lane every fall for a bin of bittersweets, I’d like to get clear of the carbon footprint. So last fall we opened up another quarter-acre, and I’ve picked out a bunch of varieties (some familiar, some new-to-us) to plant.
I’m interested in interstems because I don’t want to have to baby the trees too much; I live an hour west of the orchard, I’ve learned it’s all we can manage to water in a handful of trees semi-consistently in the first year after planting - after that they’re on their own. Apples grow wild here, and I don’t want to have to build a complex automatic irrigation system to get through August, which is the only month that’s dry more often than not. I also have limited capacity for mulching and weeding - the rows get bush-hogged ~3 times a year, but I’ve found that a half-yard of wood chips dumped haphazardly around the base of each tree with a tractor and a couple passes with a string trimmer are as much as I can manage in a season given other responsibilities. So I like the idea of a tree that combines precocity with a solid root system that can find the water and compete with the grass that makes it through the mulch.
Back before the Fedco discount deadline this winter, I ordered 10ea of B118 and M111 for the roots, and a bundle of B9 for interstems; I’m new to this but I think I saw that the B118/B9 combination had worked for folks, and it seemed like it should give a tree that’s substantially smaller than the seedling and B118 stuff I’ve been planting. Folks here and elsewhere seemed to think highly of G935, and Cummins appears to sell it by the piece, so I was thinking of putting it on the M111; as best I could tell this would make a somewhat larger tree than the B118/B9 interstem? I would really appreciate anyone’s advice on this subject, and particularly:
Do the B118/B9 and M111/G935 combinations make sense?
If so, what kind of in-row spacing would make sense in a cool coastal New England setting? Or if not, what combinations would you recommend to achieve the goals I’m lined up on?
What is the preferred length (or range of lengths) for the interstem?
Relating to how to actually execute the interstems, I was thinking to wake up the base rootstocks in the basement for a few days with the interstem rootstocks and scionwood in the fridge, then do both W&T grafts at once and let them callus up in the basement for a couple weeks before planting out. Or I could do the interstem graft, let that callus for a couple weeks with the scion in the fridge, then do the second graft, but I fear I’d damage the weak bottom graft trying to do the second one so soon. The guy who writes the Skillcult blog indicates that both grafts of the interstem can be put on at the same time. Have other folks found this to be true as well? It would be great if it wasn’t a two-year process.
This is a great forum; thanks so much for any advice!
Ben