Steve Bloom/The Olympian
Wax covers this apple tree graft.

Grafting can add variety and bounty to apple orchard

SARAH JACKSON, THE OLYMPIAN

Originally published Saturday, March 9, 2002

OLYMPIA -- So.

You have a fruit tree but you don't really like it.

Despite proper pruning and tender care, you're getting subpar apples or less-than-pretty pears.

Maybe you hate the healthy fruit -- too sour, too squishy, too tart.

Dormant sprays might not be working to rid you of pests.

Well, don't cut down that tree just yet.

Consider first the ultimate art of propagation -- fruit tree grafting.

Grafting -- how nearly all fruitful fruit trees are created nowadays -- means cutting a branch, large or small, off an undesirable tree and putting the limb of a new variety in its place.

"Really, truly it's a lost art," Master Gardener Keith Underwood of Olympia said. "You take a pencil-size-around diameter twig and actually put it into the other bark of the tree."

Most apple trees are, in fact, propagated by using strong root systems of other apple trees.

"They're all in the apple family," said Underwood, who grafted thousands of trees during his days of apple farming near Yakima.

Scion wood -- the twiggy branches added to other trees -- can be purchased or gathered with permission from a neighbor's healthy tree.

Using special techniques and a grafting knife, gardeners can add a different variety of fruit to their existing tree, and that graft can produce fruit within a few years.

"This is just a tool that you can use to get more than one variety out of an apple tree," Underwood said. "I've taken 100-year-old trees and cut all the branches back and grafted every single stump."

So if you have an apple variety in your yard, but it's ugly because of scab, you might add on more scab-resistant varieties such as Chehalis or Liberty, or a more vigorous variety such as the Gravenstein.

Try, eventually, up to 20 different varieties, depending on the tree size.

Scott Stiles, a horticulturist at Raintree Nursery in Morton, said people love the nursery's workshops on grafting, which he'll be teaching in part next Saturday.

"It's like magic, in a way," Stiles said. "You're creating a new tree from some simple little carpentry that never fails to fascinate people who watch it."

Gardeners can take scion wood and replicate trees from a grandparent's old homestead.

"They can just go cut a branch off that old heirloom tree," Stiles said, "and they can create them to pass along to their children. It's absolutely magic."

Though grafting takes lots of experience to truly master, Underwood will try to revive the practice at his workshop today -- "Getting in Touch with a Lost Art: Pruning Fruit Trees, Grafting and Budding."

"There's not a lot of people who do it anymore," Underwood said. "It's hard to find good grafters."

Yet, Underwood does it on his farm in Olympia -- demonstrating the cuts for a small whip graft and later for a 2-inch diameter stump on his Gravenstein, where he's injects three Spitzenburg apple tree twigs just under the bark.

Each twig boasts two or three buds above the graft -- secured with nails and sealed with masking tape and a homemade wax of beeswax, Italian resin and linseed oil.

"This is called a bark graft," Underwood says of the odd, small-twig-in-big-twig combination that puts the two woods' cambium layers together to form a union. "If you do this right, and you don't get a frost, every single one of them will take off."

Underwood warns that gardeners borrowing from neighbors should beware of bringing diseases to their fruit trees.

"The problem is viruses," Underwood said. "You have to be very aware."

Sarah Jackson writes for The Olympian and can be reached at 360-704-6871 or sajackso@olympia.gannett.com.

The Olympian Copyright 2002

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