Rosalind
Deeply Rooted
Here's the problem:
My neighbor raises cattle in what our town considers "farm preservation land," i.e. land that was once an orchard 100 years ago and is now mostly used only for grazing cows and the occasional sheep. Neighbor is nominally in charge of it, and said last year that I could take a graft of the peaches on said land if I wanted, as he had tried eating them and they tasted good. So, last fall I ordered grafting rootstock.
March comes, and no rootstock in the mail. I email company, asking what happened, they said they're busy but it should show up by third week of March. OK, still did not show up...I emailed again first week of April, they said again, they are busy but it shows in their system the order exists and is being filled, I should receive it shortly.
Rootstock showed up, still dormant, on Friday evening.
Yeah, well, here's the problem:
Does this look dormant to you? Or even nearly, sorta dormant, like it might be OK to graft? 'Cause it sure looks pretty lively to me.
Yeah, yeah, I know, as soon as I realized the rootstock wasn't going to show up in a timely fashion, I should have gotten the scionwood and put it in the fridge. Except I think DH would have killed me dead if his apple juice had to share fridge space with 36" bundles of peach branches.
He's a good man, but he has his limits. Anyway, all the spare fridge space this spring was filled with maple sap waiting to be boiled down.
Worse, when I hiked over to the neighbor's today, half his peach trees were dead of neglect. Lightning strikes, bugs, fungus etc. all the usual reasons peach trees croak. I would have trimmed and sprayed them for him if he had let me know they needed it--dormant oil is only sold in freakin' giant gallon bottles, and I use about 4 tbsp. per year. It would have been no big deal for me to mosey over some autumn afternoon with the dogs and let the puppies practice working his cattle while I worked on his orchard. He knows this, I have told him in person and in email many times.
He's got about two surviving peaches and two sloes. And what looks like some sort of cherries maybe.
Theoretically I can get grafts next year, although it will be about a million years before I ever get peaches out of them. In the meantime, what do I do with $40 worth of Lovell rootstock? Can I plant it in a spot on the edge of the yard and just let it do its thing for a year, then prune it back in autumn and re-dig it in the spring? Do I keep it in pots? What do I do here? I don't want to let it go to waste.
My neighbor raises cattle in what our town considers "farm preservation land," i.e. land that was once an orchard 100 years ago and is now mostly used only for grazing cows and the occasional sheep. Neighbor is nominally in charge of it, and said last year that I could take a graft of the peaches on said land if I wanted, as he had tried eating them and they tasted good. So, last fall I ordered grafting rootstock.
March comes, and no rootstock in the mail. I email company, asking what happened, they said they're busy but it should show up by third week of March. OK, still did not show up...I emailed again first week of April, they said again, they are busy but it shows in their system the order exists and is being filled, I should receive it shortly.
Rootstock showed up, still dormant, on Friday evening.
Yeah, well, here's the problem:
Does this look dormant to you? Or even nearly, sorta dormant, like it might be OK to graft? 'Cause it sure looks pretty lively to me.
Yeah, yeah, I know, as soon as I realized the rootstock wasn't going to show up in a timely fashion, I should have gotten the scionwood and put it in the fridge. Except I think DH would have killed me dead if his apple juice had to share fridge space with 36" bundles of peach branches.
He's a good man, but he has his limits. Anyway, all the spare fridge space this spring was filled with maple sap waiting to be boiled down. Worse, when I hiked over to the neighbor's today, half his peach trees were dead of neglect. Lightning strikes, bugs, fungus etc. all the usual reasons peach trees croak. I would have trimmed and sprayed them for him if he had let me know they needed it--dormant oil is only sold in freakin' giant gallon bottles, and I use about 4 tbsp. per year. It would have been no big deal for me to mosey over some autumn afternoon with the dogs and let the puppies practice working his cattle while I worked on his orchard. He knows this, I have told him in person and in email many times.
He's got about two surviving peaches and two sloes. And what looks like some sort of cherries maybe. Theoretically I can get grafts next year, although it will be about a million years before I ever get peaches out of them. In the meantime, what do I do with $40 worth of Lovell rootstock? Can I plant it in a spot on the edge of the yard and just let it do its thing for a year, then prune it back in autumn and re-dig it in the spring? Do I keep it in pots? What do I do here? I don't want to let it go to waste.
