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["Bruce Hansen" <brucedhansen@sbcglobal.net>]

AN APRIL DAY


What a beautiful sunny day in April. The pick-up, loaded with a yard and a
half of potting soil, is parked in front of the greenhouse. The seven barn
cats are all enjoying breakfast, one at a time, on one of the potting
tables. Ah! Yes, there go a couple of bunnies racing, hop, hop, towards one
of the orchards, called the big field. Several deer are already in the field
munching on the pasture clovers and grasses. The boom box is loaded with one
of the many tapes from Herodotus's Histories and I am preparing to pot a
couple of hundred apple bench grafts. First, let down the tail gate. It is a
perfect bench. Put a little soil in the pot, add a tablet of fertilizer,
plunk in a graft and pack full of soil. Then on you go to the next graft.
After the grafts are potted, in the green house they go. This is fun. Life
is good but this potting stuff is the end of quite a trail.   

It all started in February. Normally, I expect February to be a cold and
somewhat dreary month. But this winter just, as the last one, delivered a
very warm February. Sure there were cold swings but nothing like the 40
below of several years ago. February, at The Dancing Mushroom Farm and
Nursery, is a month of a lot of activity. Since we heat with wood, timbering
and bucking are very important tasks. Whew!! Next is the pruning of apple
trees and the gathering of scion (pronounced, skion) wood. Generally
speaking, this is fun. Usually, I cut my scions into eight inch lengths. I
then organize them by variety and wax both ends (except where the end is a
terminal bud). Finally, they go into a zip lock bag with a bit of moist
paper towel and are put in the nursery refrigerator. This year was a bad
year for my apples because of the drought in Michigan. And, alas, I
harvested very little scion wood. So, I ordered a lot from other producers.
The best folk in my experience are Sonoma Antique Apples (Sonoma County in
California), now under new management but the original owners (I think it is
called Fox Farm) sell the scion wood from their mother trees and Orchard
Lane in Gloucester Virginia.

Wood ordered from these folk usually arrives at the farm in late February or
early March. I inspect it, repackage it when necessary and place it in the
nursery refrigerator. I keep the temperature in storage at about 34 or 35
degrees. I purchase my rootstock from an Oregon Company (darn, I forget the
name but I think it is Willamette Nursery). Their stock is really good. It
arrives, by my choice, in early April and is inspected and placed in the
root cellar. (As an aside, if you can build a root cellar, do so. They are
fabulous.) I generally think about when and how I am going to do my grafting
a few weeks in advance. I layout my work bench and sharpen my tools. This
year, a friend gave me the tapes of Herodotus's Histories which I am going
to listen to while creating my bench grafts. My beautiful, cozy, grafting
building is called the sod house. When I built it, many years ago, I put on
a sod roof. The sod house is about 18 by 24 feet and is heated by a propane
heater with a thermostat. I keep the temperature at about 45 degrees. 

Finally, I am ready. I have told my clients that I will be gone for a few
days in order to be, during this special time, alone with the gods of
creation. First, I am off to the cellar to grab a bundle of fifty roots.
They go in a bucket of water in the sod house. The root stock, this year,
was a little bit large (oversized) given the size of the scions so I had to
use two methods of grafting. I have a grafting tool which is attached to the
work bench. It makes a cleft cut in the stock, a female cut, and a matching
male cut in the scion. When both stock and scion are the same size this is
an excellent method with success rates in excess of 95%. However, due to a
mismatch in size between the root and the scion, many of my grafts, this
year, were made with a whip graft. After the cut is made both scion and
stock are joined and wrapped tightly with buddy tape (see AM Leonard). The
resulting bench graft is labeled and placed in bundles of ten and a plastic
bag is wrapped around the roots. The grafts are left in the sod house for 10
to 14 days to callus. 

Now I ready for the pick-up truck filled with potting soil. Life is good.

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