Until now, all the apple trees in my garden have had white blossoms. I’ve been pleasantly surprised to find some of the blossoms on my new apple trees are really very colorful. The one above is Rosemary Russet apple.
I’ve been trying some more grafts. The one above is scion wood Søren sent me of a Danish heritage variety called Filippa. I’ve grafted it to MM106 rootstock, which is the locally recommended for standard growing conditions.
Anyway, in this case I wrapped the entire scion in Parafilm tape. You can see it’s starting to bud under the tape in the middle of the picture and at the top.
Søren says he thinks he sent the scion too late, as it was already starting to break it’s winter dormancy. It’s apparently nothing to see it budding, what’s really important is if the graft heals, and this may not happen if it buds too quickly and puts all of it’s resources into new spring growth.
We shall see…
This is another scion I grafted at the same time. In this case one of my existing trees of an unnamed variety onto MM106 rootstock. If you look at this picture very closely, you can see some red spots where it’s starting to bud. It obviously worked better to wrap the whole scion in parafilm, but this seems to work too. It won’t be a big loss if this graft doesn’t take, I will just try again next year.
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