This year's tree grafting project is to save a crab apple tree from our family farm. Our family farm dates back to the early settlers of Bradford County and still has some of the apple trees they planted. One tree that stood out was a 40 foot tall crab apple tree. This crab apple tree is over 150 years old and starting to show its age.
Yesterday I collected a branch from the family crab apple tree and made about a dozen grafts on wild apple trees I found growing on our property. I used a simple cleft graft where I made a cutting from the crab apple into a wedge and inserted it into a cleft cut into the wild apple tree.
After aligning the inner bark layers of the two branches I tightly seal the graft with electrical tape. If the graft is successful I will cut/remove the tape next year.
A couple of years ago I was very successful grafting pears. This pear tree graft produced fruit last year. The center branch of this graft is over 4 feet tall.
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