Crabapple Grafting

[Sam Talley]

 

My grandmother’s house was built in the late 1800s and her place had nine apple trees of different varieties on it. Settlers came to coastal Washington needing fruit trees for healthy food. She explained how an orchardist, who had a very respectable job, would transplant wild crabapple trees onto your property and then graft different varieties of domestic apples onto them. Wild crab apple trees grew all over the area. The orchardist would graft a single domestic tree branch onto a wild one and in several years they would get the kind of apple that was grafted onto the crabapple. After 50 years my grandmother’s trees were still producing bushels of apples. One huge Gravenstein tree produced more apples than we could ever use. We made apple sauce, apple butter, pies, and apple juice and wine. All prep work was done on a wood cook stove. Now, over 100 years later a few of the trees are STILL producing fruit.

[Sue Cauhape]

That's phenomenal! I can only hope our new little trees will produce something ... anything!  Maybe we shoulda grafted them to wild trees. Get some fresh genes into the mix hearty enough to survive.