Page 31 - Simply Vegetables Autumn 2021

Grafted root-stocks, 17 months old
Before I begin the afore mentioned article let me say that this year was not only notable for Covid 19 but for probably the longest stretch of wall- to-wall sunshine in my lifetime (2020) it is not often I have to water in April.
The apples took full advantage
of this Mediterranean climate and produced the finest apples I have ever seen, virtually across the board. Skin colour, flavour and texture were the very best, bumper crops of large fruit with no scab. It impressed on me how disadvantaged I am normally, growing fruit in Nottinghamshire or as the late RHS Fruit Group member, Howard Stringer used to say the Far Frozen North. The downside was of course no shows, the very best ever and all eight shows cancelled – grief stricken, all this top-quality exhibition fruit and I have to pick it just for someone to eat – sacrilege. As my wife keeps telling me ‘there are only so many apples that a person can eat’. By contrast the pears were all over the place when it came to flavour, I didn’t even pick the normally superb Beth, others were well down on flavour, the best up to now are, probably Beurre Precose Morettini, Merton Pride and probably Gorham. Most of the Gorham crop was lost to cracking around the eye
(a problem with Gorham) and wasps, hordes of the blooming things. The pears started badly when some of
the blossom was damaged by frost,
in particular the Comice. One little pearl is the Maltese pear Bambinella, small as its name suggests but sweet, juicy and crunchy, don’t nibble too close to the core though it is a little
Making a Cleft Graft
gritty, hopefully it may lose the grittiness as the tree matures. I read that this pear is imported and, indeed someone is growing it commercially in Herefordshire.
a strip of plastic carrier bag- easy. Where you cut the rootstock back to
is up to you, I go for, as far as possible ‘like’ diameters, around a pencil plus thick. I once read that the further you graft up the stem of the rootstock the more dwarfing the resultant tree will be. In regard to the scion the number of buds you leave on depends on how niggardly you are, I utilise two or three, but it is highly likely the bottom two will be rubbed out when they start to grow and have made several inches. I buy in scions from Brogdale at a fiver apiece; I could get three scions out of one of their scions by cutting it up into three, two buds on each one. When I first started grafting rootstocks, I bench grafted them,
well sat down on a chair doing it over my knees, and then planted them in nursery beds on the edge of the veg plots. Trouble was this was sticky clay and sometimes frozen, I bought in some 35L tree buckets from LBS, drilled more drainage holes and filled them with my non patented 3.2.1. compost (topsoil, peat - yes a dirty word and sharp
sand.) This mix keeps the watering to the minimum and it’s friable. By all means plant the rootstock a lot deeper to encourage more roots higher up the stem. Mulch with 1⁄2” pea gravel
to keep out the evil weevil. I place the buckets in the greenhouse until early June, by then I may need the space, this year (2020) they stayed there to
Back to Hard Graft. Going back several years my approach to grafting was, to let someone else do it as, I really couldn’t be bothered to get involved, that changed when willing slaves dried up; later the Midland’s Fruit Group came up with the idea of grafting workshops. The root-stocks were either obtained from the NFG (Northern Fruit Group) or from Walcot Organic Nursery. Apples went on to M9 or M27, plums on to St Julian A and pears onto QA (forget QC, the fruit is smaller.) My typical graft is a version of the whip and tongue
but without the tongue,
it is much easier, simple
and safer, I call it a scarf
joint, we used it to join
solid electrical cables as
an apprentice at college.
I make a cut around two
inches plus long tapering
down to nothing, do this
on the cut back rootstock
and another one on
the scion, marry them
together, leaving around
a quarter of an inch of cut wood on the scion above the rootstock, this is called the ‘church window’ and improves
the growing over process. Make sure the inner layers, the cambium layers are in contact and bind with rubber budding bands, apply grafting wax,
the late Jeremy Slane once did one
for me and only bound the graft with
My typical graft is a version of the whip and tongue but without the tongue
Simply Vegetables 31