It’s what’s happening at Slowpoke right now: grafting trees and feeling grateful about being reviewed in Texas Monthly!
At the farm house, you can always find a bowl, a bag or a pile of fruit seeds. You cannot eat a piece of fruit without saving the seed. One of our best apple trees came from such a seed. Of course when you plant a fruit seed and a tree grows, you do not know if it will produce edible fruit. The best thing to do is ‘graft’ a known, improved variety of fruit to your seedling tree.
I shared a picture in the summer of 2018 of Kerry’s 250 foot row of seedling apricot
trees (see above photo). I called it his tree nursery and it was quite impressive.
This week, Kerry began ‘grafting’ his apricot trees. He grafted cuttings from peaches, plums and apricots. In the pictures you can see him with a baby apricot tree, which he trims to about 6” above ground and that’s where he’ll make his graft. In another picture he is grafting to the branch of an older tree. This tree died, and came back up from the base, from it’s ‘root stock.’ This is ideal for grafting.
Time will tell which grafts will take, we just have to be patient. If you aren’t the grafting and patient type, go to Womack’s Nursery outside of DeLeon. They’ll get you fixed up with trees that grow well in our area. Remember our philosophy, ‘Plant it Forward,’ plant fruit trees now so that someone will enjoy them later.
Two weeks ago this Friday, a customer congratulated us on being in Texas Monthly. We said ‘What are you talking about?’ Apparently we were visited and reviewed by Texas Monthly and we made the magazine and the on-line edition this month. Thank you for your continued support so we can keep doing what we’re doing. Here is the web address to the on-line article:
https://www.texasmonthly.com/
Pictures: 1. Kerry helping a friend plant a new tree. 2. The row of seedling apricot trees. 3. Kerry has trimmed one tree and is getting ready to attach a graft. 4. You can see the graft point, where the ‘V’ changes color; it’s lighter below and darker above). 5. Bunny is the best cheerleader. 6. Wrapping the graft. 7. The supervisors, or spectators enjoying the nice winter day.
