"The Rollercoaster of New England Spring: From Sunshine to Snow"

loamseason
Mar 30, 2024
2 min read

3/30/2024

Unpredictable weather isn't new to us, but it does prove mother nature has a sense of humor. We had weeks of weather in the 40-50s including warm enough weather that the ground thawed enough to start loosening our garden beds. Then we enjoyed 26 inches of snow in 24hrs, the largest snow storm of the year. It's beautiful! It is a good thing we have plenty of work to do indoors for now!

We have been busy the last week with the arrival of our root stocks and scions for our 2024 planting. We are sourcing the majority of our root stocks and scions from Northeast suppliers including Fedco Seeds in Maine and Cummins Nursery in New York state, with hopes of limiting our climate impact. At the time of this post, we are in the process of grafting the scions on to the root stocks (see the pics below!). We are using Whip & Tongue grafting to allow for excellent cambium surface area contact and joint stability. We are able to graft ~120 trees daily with us both at the table, and have about 400 done so far (out of ~900).

We have chosen the root stocks for a number of reasons:

resistant to all major disease
ideal fruit size
dwarf tree hight ~12ft
encourages wide branch angles
cold hearty.

We have a very large variety of scions (young tree shoots/twigs) for our fruit, both already planted in 2023, and planned for this year's planting. We have chosen to plant a large variety of cultivars (apple varieties) based on several qualities: