North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Douglas Woodard <dwoodard@becon.org>]

Ernest, grafted trees from commercial sources would probably be grafted 
on Mazzard or Mahaleb. If I remember rightly you are in a particularly 
cold area of northern Minnesota. I would expect your temperatures to 
damage (in a warm winter unless with heavy snow cover) or kill either 
Mazzard or Mahaleb. Mahaleb is fussy about good drainage, likes a coarse 
subsoil. Any hardy rootstock readily available cheap to a comercial 
nursery is likely to suffer from compatibility problems. The only 
rootstock I can think of that *might* suit is Prunus X Dropmoreana, 
Frank Skinner's creation. Forty years ago East Malling did some work 
with it as a stock for sweet cherries, and from what I recall reading, 
some clones of it were compatible with sweets and some were not.

If your sources were what I would consider fully competent and 
honourable, they would have told you what rootstock they were using - 
unless maybe they were afraid their competition would find out about it.
This kind of competitive pressure is one of the curses of the nursry 
business. It's extremely hard to know if your supplier is understandably 
secretive, or crooked or irresponsible.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada


Ernest Plutko wrote:
> "Before" means before I buried grafts.  I was not doing a research
> study.  I was just trying to get trees to live through winters. I
> bought trees from several sources. Local and mail-order. It is
> possible burying graft is just protecting graft from winter cold. 
> This fall I will probe around buried trunks to see if roots have
> grown from Evans trunks.  I'll look up Evans own-root sources and let
> you know.
>
> ---- Original Message ----
> From: murphman108@msn.com
> To: nafex@lists.ibiblio.org
> Subject: RE: [NAFEX] Ernest's Evans cherries
> Date: Sat, 19 Jun 2010 03:14:46 +0000
>
> > Hello Ernest;
> >
> >
> >
> > I am interested in your Evans story. The trees that you buried the
> > graft union were better 'than before'. What does 'than before' mean?
> > Did you plant some at the same time from the same batch without
> > burying the graft? Same plant source? This is a decent finding on
> > your part. Please elaborate. Also, who is the 'own root' Evans cherry
> > tree source?
> >
> >
> >
> > Murph
> >
> > R A Murphy Jr