Watch our horticulture specialist, Phil, as he demonstrates stump grafting Minnieska (SweeTango apple) to a G-41 rootstock.

Phil’s rescuing failed trees that we chip budded a year ago last August. The G-41 rootstock we chose is revered for its productiveness and resistance to replant disease, fireblight, and wooly apple aphid. A weakness with this rootstock is that it’s brittle in the graft union. The former tree suffered this demise, so Phil’s top working it again. We’ll take care of this new graft by staking and trellising the growing tree to stabilize the graft union.

Last spring, when the rootstock was dormant, Bill carefully cut each one off right above the chip bud using a pair of sharp loppers. Its called growing your trees in place when you begin with rootstock versus planting a tree grown by a nursery. It’s an option that is cheaper but is sometimes slower since you have to wait for the trees to grow. In this situation, the growth happened quickly! Once this rootstock broke dormancy around the first of May, the chip buds sprouted and grew like gangbusters!

By fall, this is how much they had grown from sprout to tree. We can attribute this remarkable growth to virgin soil and its former use as a mule pasture.

And yet, not every tree succeeded in this process. Sometimes there’s a problem. We had some chip buds fail because the plastic ribbon that held them in place decomposed before the union healed, and the chip dried up. Sometimes a coyote, a deer, or the wind will break the union where the tree is growing from the rootstock. We farmers don’t give up! Stump grafting gives us another opportunity to make a tree. Excellent work, Phil!