Wednesday, April 01, 2009

Spring blossoms and hard grafting



With the arrival of longer days, we start to see greater number of plants in blossom. We have recently finished enjoying the white and purple blooms of a specific plum tree that produces a small sweet fruit and the "piesco", a type of old fashioned asturian peach. At La Pasera we are enjoying the white cherry blossom from our own old cherries. We are told that the biggest one has a very good variety of cherry. We are hoping to try them towards the end of May, it will require the use of a tall ladder or scaffolding to get to the fruits. We intend to graft it next year if we feel it is good enough. If not, the birds will enjoy them and we will continue to use the tree to support the hammock.
The apple trees are behind and as a result we were able to graft one of the apple trees with a nice variety of russet apple that my sister Rita has. This grafting was done by attaching to one of the branches of the parent tree a pencil thin, last year´s growth and non-flowering shoot. This is the first time I have done any grafting and I am looking forward to see the results later on in August. By this month you should know if the graft has taken. I am following the grafting method shown to my by a neighbour. Later in Summer, during July and August, I intend to have a go at bud grafting, this method was explained to me by a small and local fruit tree producer. Fruit and nuts are an important side of our diet and we have increased the number of trees that can provides us with produce. In the garden we currently has several wild hazel nuts, a walnut, two old and a younger cherry trees, three large and a young apple tree. Since we came to La Pasera, we have also added to our orchard two pear trees, a greengage, an orange tree, two piescos and an avocado tree still very young as we grew from seed. Additional fruit and nut trees are scattered around in adjacent fields.

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