155. Developing my own root-stocks . . .

Those of you following my blog will know that I have been trying a little grafting over the last couple of years, mainly apple and pear scions to my hawthorn hedge. Surprisingly with some success.

I wanted some root stocks to continue my grafting experiments, and came up with three solutions.

1. buy
2. grow from pips - but then there is no control over the size of the subsequent trees
3. make my  cloned rootstocks (the same as you would buy)

I already have an experiment  for solution '2' going (I have about a dozen saplings about 20 cm high).

The attached picture is my experiment for solution '3'. I was given an MM106 sapling (the severed sapling in the photo) and planted it in my new tree nursery. Then I made a coppicing saw cut (see stump in centre of sawdust).

I built the box around the stump and filled it with sawdust (normally covering the stump too). Hopefully, the roots will send up shoots through the sawdust, and after a year (or possibly two) the whole rootstock can be dug up, the new root / shoots separated (maybe a dzoen or so), and potted up.

The new root shoots will be MM106 rootstocks (clones of the original) and can be grafted onto, and the original rootstock can be re-planted and used again.

That's the (fascinating) theory, anyway.

Will keep you posted.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

285. Been thinking about my last blog . . .

Image
. . . even if no-one else has. One of the implications of much of an apple's goodness (minerals and vitamins) being in its seeds is that to benefit they have to be eaten. And not just eaten but chewed up as apple seeds tend simply to be passed. I then remembered something about apple pips containing cyanide. I began to look into all this . . . There are hundreds and hundreds of web snippets on the benefits of eating apples, an apple a day keeps the doctor away and all that. But quite difficult to shore it up with trusted sources. A medium-sized apple weighs 150g - 200g and contains half that number of calories. 80% is water, 10% is carbohydrate, 0.5% protein and 4% minerals and vitamins. Half the minerals and vitamins and fibre are in the peel and the core. Apple pips contain amygdalin which can release cyanide when coming contact with digestive enzymes. According to the http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/contact-us/about-us/  (Cambridge University group) a...
Read more

319. We've got a dog!

Image
I know, I know . . . but I've kind of always wanted one . . . . . . from when I was very young, before I joined the Job, when I was thinking about joining the Job. I had a dream (I must have been 13 or 14, and I had lots of posters of dogs on my bedroom walls) about becoming a bearded-batchelor police dog-handler. In my dream I called the dog Wolfram . And guess what? We've called our dog  Wolfram ! He's so cute. He is, of course, an Alsatian and a good guard-dog. Which will be good because this is a big place and Sarah's away a lot. (The door-bell went off in the middle of the night last week, no-one there, turned out it was half-pressed in, but it didn't half freak me out.) Anyway, Wolfram is a new type of dog. Specially bred for people like me. He's a veggie. Eats like a horse of course, but and this is the point, he eats just like a horse. CRUCIALLY, he shits like a horse too. So, no smelly piles all around the garden but just the sweet...
Read more

73. Stuck for something to read?

Try a William Boyd novel. They hook you from the start, have interesting and original plots and are not overly long. What's more there are lots of them, and relatively easy to find in second-hand bookshops. Perfect for a holiday read, if you are stuck on a difficult novel or just want something a bit different. His books sometimes feel like he has written them with the aid of a special book-kaleidoscope: twist it again, 10 bizarre plot-lines fall out and Boyd glues them together in 300 pages. Try one!
Read more