Peaches Gone Wild

 

Freestone peach varieties are grafted onto hardier peach tree rootstock. A few years ago, we had such a tree freeze at the graft. The next year, branches appeared and we thought everything was going to be alright, but we had another think coming. When the peaches ripened we discovered that they were the original, clingstone type of peaches.

 

Those peaches were very good, but small and, as you can imagine, hard to separate the flesh from the pit.

Believe me.

I know.

 

The best that we could do to eat a fresh one was to gnaw the fruit off the stone. Now, gnawing might help rats to grow new teeth, but it does nothing for human teeth, making those clingstone peaches our most frustrating fruit to eat fresh.

Most of the peaches from the reverted-back-to-its-roots tree ended up as jam because I practically had to butcher them to get the flesh off the stones.

Yep…life was the pits

Jim was thinking of taking the tree down, but decided to dust off an old skill learned during his career as a student at The Ohio State University when he was working on his landscape horticulture degree.

 

I am talking about grafting.

 

 

Basically, grafting is cutting a slit in a limb of a tree and slipping a cutting from another tree into it.

First, Jim cut off all of the rootstock tree's branches except for one.

 

 

The cutting has to be small, with one bud remaining.

The bark of the cutting has to be whittled away to expose the inside.

 

 

 

A slit is made on the tree that the cutting is being grafted to. 

 

 

The cutting is inserted in this slip, green touching green.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tape, such as black electrician’s tape, is wrapped around the cutting to hold it in place.

The last step is to seal the entire cutting and wound with beeswax.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sounds simple enough, doesn’t it? Only time will tell if Jim’s grafting work takes hold. For fun, he decided to graft a nectarine onto a healthy peach tree, to see if he will have a peach tree with a branch of nectarines. Oh…that Jim…ain’t he a stinker? LOL

Now, here’s what I am thinking when I consider the Plight of the Peachtree; that tree was planted where a plum tree had plum upped and died from some sort of smut disease. Could it be that that particular spot in the orchard is jinxed or ~gasp~ haunted?

*cue Twilight Zone theme song*

 

Marcheta *feelin' peachy