Grafting this Spring

A successful apple graft

    Over the past week, I've been getting plenty of practice with my grafting knife by propagating apples and pears in our fruit orchard. Fortunately for me, the best time to graft apples and pears is usually several weeks before it is time to start pecan tree grafting. However, working in the fruit orchard has got me thinking.
     I know that several people are disappointed that my recent retirement means that I won't be traveling around Kansas, Missouri and Oklahoma to hold grafting classes. However, I will be doing plenty of pecan grafting on my own farm and would happy to demonstrate the techniques to anyone willing to drive to my place. As of today, it looks like I'll start grafting around April  27th. I do most of my grafting in the mornings and it should take me about 2 weeks to work all trees that are ready for grafting. So, if your interested, pick a pretty day and come see me in the morning. Our farm is located 4.5 miles east of Chetopa, KS on US Hwy 166 then south onto 95th Street. A sign for "Brenda's Berries" (our fruit business) marks the turn off the highway. As you drive south on 95th street, our pecan orchard is on the east side of the road. You should be able to see me in the pecan orchard grafting trees.
     In addition, I've been invited by the Indiana Nut Growers to hold a grafting class in southern IN. Hopefully, folks from IL, IN, KY and OH will find this grafting workshop worth the drive. Information about this meeting, to be held on May 18th, can be found by pressing the Events Tab above.
   One more thing. Several years ago I created a slide show showing the grafting techniques I use for grafting apples, pears and pecans. I have placed this slide show on a new page that you can access by pressing the Tab just below the mast head. You will note that I use some different methods for apples and pears I haven't presented in this blog for use on pecans. These fruit tree grafting methods are some of the oldest methods of grafting known to man but I don't recommend the splice graft and cleft graft for field grafting pecan trees.