A successful graft!

Several months ago, this spring, we attempted around 8 grafts from cuttings from an apple tree at our old house onto some of the existing old apple's at our new house. I wasn't very optimistic due to it being our first time trying grafting, and due to it being a little later than seemed optimal in terms of the cuttings and trees to graft to already being a bit far along with budding out. We also didn't have the best grafting supplies, using syran wrap and elastic bands instead of more specialized grafting supplies. But, we went ahead and tried, because the apple from our old house had such yummy fruit that we didn't want to lose that variety.

And imagine my surprise late last week when wandering through the orchard I realized that behind the one remaining syran-wrapped graft there were green leaves trying to burst free! One of the grafts took! I quickly unwrapped the syran wrap from the tip where the green leaves were trying to emerge.

 Then I checked on how the graft area was doing under the plastic. It was looking good! definite scar tissue had developed, joining the grafted cutting onto the parent tree. Not a perfect seal yet, but a start! So exciting!

Most if not all of our other attempts this spring ended in failure - the syran wrap falling off, or the entire cutting falling out. But for some reason, this one has worked out so far, and it is even the first one we did out of the bunch we did this spring! I'm not certain that it will manage to survive into next year, let alone produce fruit ever, but what an encouraging start to our grafting journey! If you want to see how where we read up about grafting, and how we grafted, check out my first post on grafting. If you never start trying, you are never going to succeed, and this has been so true in our first grafting experiment!

Linking up to the Homestead Barn Hop.