Grafting Apple Trees: Why, What, When, Where, & How

All welcome.  Register free via Eventbrite to receive the Zoom event link.

Help save your grandparent’s apple varieties for today and tomorrow.  Create a future with more apple choices. Meet and spend time online with David Maxwell, the experienced apple grower whose passion is teaching and growing, collecting, and saving apple varieties.

Growing apples and other fruit in small backyard orchards, avoiding the use of chemical sprays, motivated by an awe of nature rather than commerce, requires a very different approach from that of the large commercial growers. This Zoom session aims to share some of the insights gained over an almost 50 year experience of growing apples and other fruit in small back yard orchards. 

David Maxwell has been growing apples, (and other fruit), in small backyard orchards, as he moved around the country, for almost 50 years.  His current incarnation comprises a luxurious 1/6 of an acre with approximately 180 trees of 50+ varieties, mostly apples, in Middle LaHave.)  His initial motivation was saving the old varieties which were rapidly disappearing from commerce, but over the years he slipped into collecting lesser known, more modern, cultivars also.  

David is now entering his twilight years and feeling an imperative to pass on the insights gained over 50 years of amateur growing, working with nature rather than fighting her, and spreading his (apple) seed as widely as possible.

 

Workshop Description

There are as many as 20,000 named cultivars, (varieties), of apples, of which at least half have disappeared entirely within the last hundred years. The remaining ones are very rapidly headed for extinction, and are being replaced by a few dozen modern varieties heavily marketed by BigAg. If you want even one of the apples your grandparents grew up with, such as a Baldwin, King, or Wolf River, you have to grow it yourself. And if you hanker after “foreign” fruit like the Dutch Belle de Boskoop, or the British Bramley Seedling, (which is absolutely unexcelled in the world as a “cooker”), you are even more dependent on your own resources. Finally, if you want to sample apples which have justifiably continued to be cultivated for many centuries, like the Pomme Gris, which was known in France in 1585, and could very possibly have been brought to North America by Isaac de Rassilly in 1632, you need to join the fellowship of amateurs who are dedicated to the preservation of these cultivars.

This Zoom presentation intends to cover:

1. How to choose what to grow,
2. How and where to find trees,
3. How to create your own trees by grafting or budding, (with direction on where to find materials and resources.),
4. How to manage your new trees,
5. And a quick discussion of organic management of diseases and insect pests.

With an agenda as wide ranging as this it is obvious that we cannot expect to do more than skate over the surface of each item, and so we plan to leave time to address subjects which catch the attention of the participants, in greater depth, in an interactive Q&A.

 

Participants will be offered resources to get started successfully grafting and growing apples.  Apples don’t come true to seed, so the necessity to graft.

So, where does this leave us?  1) buy grafted trees – from David Maxwell, from Maple Grove Nursery, from WhiffleTree Nursery, from Alicia (a local source), and from nurseries in Ontario and elsewhere.  David will provide listings of trees available from these sources and can advise to help determine what might work best for you.

Alternatively, graft your own.  David will help with listings of resources on the web.  And will list where locally to get rootstock and where to get scion wood.  Participants will be offered a group purchase of rootstocks and suitable grafting knives, and a selection of high quality, fresh scion wood free from local sources dedicated to preserving worthy apples.  All will be delivered locally to St. Margarets Bay and to Halifax for pick up.

Additionally, for participants, more personal help from David can be arranged, both online and in person.

 

This event is free (donations appreciated!) and requires registration via Eventbite.

We will be conducting this event on Zoom, and the link will be provided via email at time of registration.

It will be recorded.