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  • From: "Dave Griffin " <griffingardens@earthlink.net>
  • To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [NAFEX] Dieback/forward?
  • Date: Thu, 15 May 2003 6:38:7 -0500

Anyone wish to contribute to an understanding of a winter dieback phenomenon that has me completely baffled?
Last spring I planted  3 Mariana 2624 rootstocks. They grew like weeds through the summer and too long into our wet fall, but then set a terminal bud before an also delayed (mercifully) killing frost.  It looked like bad gone worse when our usually reliable snow cover went east, and we were left with an open prairie winter with lots of desicating wind and dry air with bright sun. We had a  min T of -17F - pretty balmy for MN - but with the lack of snow cover there was very deep frost (I heard of more frozen septic systems this year than I can ever remember). I expected, and got, a lot of dieback this spring on the 2624 and almost everything else, including some of the native vegetation.  In early April, when the frost started coming out of the ground, I was pleasantly surprised to see lots of green wood below the dead tips and took cuttings and set them out in the rooting bed. I left a 2-3 ft healthy looking stem with healthy looking buds that suddenly looked dead 2 weeks later. I thought the deep frost had killed the roots, but they looked good when I dug one up to move it. I then expected to eventually get suckers off the roots, and now there are adventicious buds forming at the base of all 3 trunks, but the remaining stem is brown to the scratch test and hard and dry. If Rip just got up and looked at the mother plants in the nursery, he would see what  seems like a perfectly typical case of dieback to the ground, but if he took his large coffee and walked out to look at the rooting bed, he would see buds breaking and new leaves on 70% of the cuttings. What the....?
 
Dave
Zone 4a
 
 



  • [NAFEX] Dieback/forward?, Dave Griffin , 05/15/2003

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