North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Ginda Fisher <list@ginda.us>]

All this talk of rootstocks has reminded me of the question I will face 
this spring.  Last spring I bought some trees from Cummins.  Two of 
them were trees I wanted, and I purchased the third mostly to trial its 
rootstock.

Ashmeads Kernal of M7
Tydeman's Late ORange on M111
Golden Russet on G30 (purchased mostly for the rootstock)

I also want to grow a Karmijn, of which they were sold out.  I have a 
couple of branches of Karmijn growing on a crab.  Other than the winter 
moths and scab, they look healthy enough, but don't get much sun.

Does anyone know how sensitive G30 is to random viruses?  The simplest 
thing to do would be to graft the Karmijn directly to the G30, but it's 
on a crab with 4 other cultivars, and who knows what viruses lurk in 
that tree.  (I had another multi-graft crab that died a couple of years 
after I grafted to it.  We had two summers of drought, but I think it 
was probably weakened by some virus.  I was careful about not moving 
directly between the trees - washed everything and grafted on different 
days with differently sourced scions, but it is a warning.)

So the safer thing is probably to move the Asmeads to the G30, and the 
Karmijn to the M7.  But it's more work and exposes me to a higher risk 
of messing up with the grafting.

Advice?

Also, if I'm grafting among trees on the property, would you recommend 
grafting spring twigs or summer buds?  And if spring twigs, would you 
collect them early, or just cut them when I am ready to use them, in 
April?

Thanks,
Ginda Fisher
eastern Mass.  zone 6