Grafting in Union Valley

The cold room at Chelan Fruit is where we store our grafting wood. The Honeycrisp wood that we'll use comes from our block up Purtteman Gulch. The Kanzi wood came from Columbia Fruit Packers.

This is looking inside the cold room. A lot of growers store their wood here. The refrigerated environment keeps the wood dormant, so it can be stored as late as June. An employee for Chelan Fruit waters the wood daily. They do a really nice job of keeping the wood in good condition. 

We received our Kanzi wood from Columbia Fruit in this apple bin with the plastic cover. The cover is to ensure the wood doesn't dry out, however with Chelan Fruit's exceptional care that isn't a concern.

We also have some replacement trees stored: Pinatas and Honeycrisp.

Our grafter is Gary McMonagle, and this is his assistant trimming everything creating a fresh cut to graft into. He's working on the 2 acres of Golden Delicious that we're grafting to Honeycrisp. Union Valley should be able to grow the same excellent quality of Honeycrisps as Purtteman Gulch. It's a big cold canyon like Purtteman Gulch with a similar elevation. 

Bill calculated the prior cuts so that this remaining piece of wood cut off would be fire place length. Good thinking, Bill! The remaining tree is still a Golden Delicious. The idea is to not leave a lot of the original tree.

This is Gary's work station with all the supplies to do everything they need no matter where they are.The trailer has paint, tape, spare chains for the chain saw, and a compressor. The truck has a couple of generators, and they've mechanized as much of the work as possible. There is a band saw to cut the wood into grafting sticks around 6 inches long. 

The ladies are prepping for their jobs. One is cutting her grafting sticks and the other is gathering her paint and tape.

The lady with the bag of grafting sticks makes slits into the stump of the tree and shaves the grafting stick to a point. Then she puts the stick into the slit. She does this every couple of inches all the way around the stump. Thus, the stump with a smaller diameter will have fewer grafting sticks. Her partner tapes the stump immediately to seal it air tight. The two ladies do about 10 trees and then the one who tapes goes back to paint around the tape.

A stick is being shaved in this picture.

The stick goes into the slit.

This is a special grafting paint that goes on to further seal the sticks into the bark after the tape has been applied.

To da, in 3 years we'll be harvesting Honeycrisp on these 2 acres! Now the grafters will move to the fuji block and begin this process all over again to graft Kanzi on to the fuji trees. We're very excited about Kanzi. If you didn't read my post last fall about Kanzi, then you should go back, and do it now! Don't get caught unprepared for the next Farm Quiz!