These are the apple varieties available for grafting at the Benevolence Orchard & Gardens grafting workshop on Saturday, April 6, 2024

Akane       From orangepippin.com: "Akane is useful early season apple with an unusually good balance of sweet and sharp flavors. The flesh is firm rather than crisp, but with plenty of juice."

Ashmeads Kernel       Russeted apple. From orangepippin.com: "Ashmeads Kernel has remained popular for well over 2 centuries, and with good reason: it has a distinctive flavour which is quite different from most other varieties."

Baldwin       Good keeper, juice valuable in hard cider, and it does well here in the Boulder area.

Blanc Mollet       French bittersweet hard cider apple from the 1700s.

Cortland       A McIntosh-like apple. Good for juice and fresh eating when perfectly ripe, but doesn’t store as well as some.

Duchess of Oldenburg       1700s Russian apple, early season. One of the apples used to breed Honeycrisp.

Esopus Spitzenburg       Late 1700s New York apple. Very good eating apple. Keeps well.

Fireside       Good for pies, sauce, and fresh eating. Ripens later in the harvest season.

Freedom       Good for fresh eating and pies. One source recommends it highly as a dried apple. Resistant to two diseases, scab and cedar apple rust, that aren’t big problems here.

Gold Star       Pomiferous: "Moderately sweet with some tartness and perfumed, fruity aroma."

Golden Russet       Eric’s favorite apple — if I could only eat one apple ever again, I’d choose this one. Dense, bursting with flavor. High BRIX makes it valuable for hard cider. Grows well in the Boulder area. Late harvest season.

Grimes Golden       One of the parents of Golden Delicious. Unlike most apple cultivars, it is partially self-fertile and does not require another nearby tree for pollination.

Gros Frequin       Bittersweet hard cider apple. Gros Frequin has done well on the West Slope and we are trialing it here.

Harrison       Although considered a hard cider apple, I like Harrison for eating out of hand.

Hewe’s Virginia       A smaller-sized apple (sometimes called a crab), Hewe’s has notable astringency and is excellent in hard cider. I also like to eat this variety fresh, however.

Kingston Black       A bittersharp hard cider apple.

Liberty       A McIntosh-like apple. Useful for fresh eating and in hard cider.

Mutsu       Mutsu, also called Crispin, is a Japanese variety. It is like a very large Golden Delicious. Good cooking apple and very good for fresh eating. The largest apple I ever saw was a Mutsu, in California.

Prairie Spy       Prairie Spy is an early University of Minnesota apple that is very cold hardy. It would be a good one to try in mountain locations. Good eating apple.

Six-finger Jack       Montezuma Orchard Restoration Project in southwest CO has preserved and propagated this apple. It has a very high BRIX and would likely be good in hard cider.

Smokehouse       A fine cooking and eating apple that keeps very well into the late Winter.

State Fair       Summer apple. Very good when perfectly ripe, but doesn’t keep for a long time. A good choice for a small orchard that needs apples of various ripening times.

Sweet Sixteen       A fireblight-resistant mid-season ripening apple. From the University of Minnesota, so it puts up with cold climates.

Wealthy       Good for many uses. Commonly found on old homesteads on the Great Plains.

Wolf River       A very large apple very good for cooking. Very cold tolerant.

Here’s a how-to for the folks who came to our 2023 grafting event at Benevolence Orchard:

https://www.widespreadmalus.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/care_of_trees.pdf

*NOTE, January 1, 2023: PI 657118 is now known to be a hybrid of Malus sieversii and Malus domestica, NOT pure Malus sieversii.

We do. That’s all of them, right there. PI 657118, obtained from USDA and grafted in 2016 on highly-dwarfing Budogovsky 9 rootstock, produced four apples this year, still living in a 3-gallon pot. Granted, it’s not much seed, but it’s the first from the trees we grafted ourselves (we’ve had a bit of seed already from a purchased Malus sieversii tree). It’s a start.

PI 657118 is from Kazakhstan, close to the Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan borders. The pollen parent for our small seed harvest is not known.

I was surprised we had any fruit at all this year, given the April plunge that pretty much ruined the local crop. We are poised to produce more seed than this; the trees at the orchard, which will be in their sixth growing season in 2021, should have a crop the next year we have favorable weather.

This post is mostly just a “Wheee! We did it!” item. Growing wild apples is a way to protect genetic diversity that may be especially important for breeding new apple cultivars in a time of climate change. It’s also fun.

If you happen to be interested in Malus sieversii, we do have a few seeds to share, but there are still better options at this point. Contact the people in charge of the national apple collection at Geneva, NY. Last time I checked they’d still send 100 seeds (25 from each of 4 mother trees) to any interested person, free. Instructions for germination and care are included. Google around to find them, or feel free to email, and I’ll send you the contact info.

I’m propagating a couple of interesting apricots.

One is/was the co-state champion tree for Colorado, with a trunk much larger than I can get my arms around, but it’s in severe decline. I grafted a copy in about 2014 that’s now reached bearing age.  Apparently the original is well over a century old. It is also more reliable than any other apricot I’ve seen in the Boulder area, producing a few fruits during many years that other apricots are barren.  In 2008 we made quite a bit of jam from groundfalls. (Visit this tree on the north side of the West Senior Center in downtown Boulder).

The other is from 8100′ in Garfield County, next to a dirt road, two thousand feet above the Colorado River. This had fruit when I first noticed it in the summer of about 2003. It bore a good crop a couple of years ago. This tree is in quite a xeric spot — dry hillside, south facing — but has been doing pretty well there. As with the other tree, fruits are small, but good-tasting.

This apricot tree, at 8100′ elevation on the Coffee Pot Road in Garfield County, is the highest fruiting apricot I’ve yet seen in Colorado.

I’d like to get both of these trees grafted onto rootstocks and distributed to several interested, experienced gardeners/fruit growers.  For this next round of propagation, I want to ensure the continuation of these varieties, but in future years I think it would be great to see them more widely distributed.

If you are in the (general) Boulder/Denver area, and are interested in growing one or both of these, please contact me (Eric) and let me know a  bit about you and your experience with fruit growing.  It’s conceivable I’ll have some small trees in 2021, but due to a delay in receiving some rootstocks, it could be 2022.

Short of providing actual trees, I’m also happy to provide dormant scions/budwood or Summer budwood.  Let me know if that’s of interest.

January Late January into mid-February is what I consider the best time to collect dormant apple scionwood in the Boulder area (note, after a few years of cutting scions here, I’m now of the opinion that waiting until February is suboptimal). Later, and a warm winter could mean buds already swelling — i.e. they are no longer dormant, but starting to grow. We want the wood to be dormant because when we graft it to a rootstock, the junction will need to heal before the rootstock can supply the scion with water and nutrients. If the scion starts to grow before the graft union heals, it is likely to die from lack of water for the emerging leaves.

Once the time has arrived for collecting wood, get a sharp pair of hand pruners and head out to the trees. Look for last year’s wood. Follow a relatively upright branch downward past each bud until you get to a spot where there’s a bit of a ringlike ridge around the branch. Small branches often grow out from a location just below here, and there are also usually a few buds crowded right above this spot. Higher up, the buds are farther apart.

Identify the bottom of last year’s growth, where the ringlike structure and crowded buds are. Cut scionwood from the portion of the branch above this area. The diameter of the scionwood that’ll be cut from this branch is nearly ideal.

(As an aside for those who read Selecting budwood for summer bud grafting, the wood we’re looking for now is the same that one would have selected last summer for bud grafting, only now it has matured and the leaves are long gone.)

Ideally I’d cut scionwood that’s about 6-7mm (1/4″) in diameter, which is easy to work with and is close to the diameter of typical rootstock. However, sometimes there is no scionwood as thick as that. No problem. Get what you can, because you’ll probably be able to graft it.

Sometimes ideal scionwood is unavailable. In that case, get the best scionwood you can. Note the ballpoint pen for scale. The scionwood here is smaller than ideal.

Once you’ve cut your scions, they might look like this:

Here’s the cut scionwood. The piece on the left is nearly ideal. The thin wood on the right has just been cut from the branched wood below (the branched wood will be discarded).

Cut the wood to lengths that will fit in a gallon ziploc or similar plastic bag. Trim off the top inch or so, unless your scionwood is very short. Seal all cuts with a quick dip into a candle, to coat cut surfaces with wax. Of course, don’t leave the wood near the burning candle for more than a the fraction of a second it takes to coat the end with wax.

It’s hard to see the wax on the ends, but here is trimmed and sealed scionwood:

This scionwood has been cut to length for storage in a ziploc bag, and cut surfaces have been sealed with wax from a burning candle.

Lastly, mark your scions as to identity with some cloth medical tape or something similar. Store them in a refrigerator if possible, but do not put them into the fridge where you keep your food — gases given off by some foods may encourage the scions to break dormancy. I have a small ‘dorm fridge’ that I start up each year just for grafting season. If you don’t have a refrigerator, consider putting the scions on the shady side of a building (north side in our hemisphere), covering with enough leaves or other insulation to prevent freezing.

Finished scions, ready for storage until grafting begins in late March:

This scionwood has been labeled and is ready for storage. These scions are from a USDA-collected wild apple I’ve grown out, and have a code number rather than a name like Honeycrisp or Fuji.

Want to learn how to graft apples? We’re planning a workshop for Saturday, March 18, mid-morning to about noon. Rootstock and choice of apple varieties will be available. The cost will be a few dollars. Come and graft your own tree to take home! If interested, please let us know: http://bit.ly/contact_wm

We’re planning to distribute low-cost rootstocks ($1-$3 per tree) and hold a couple of grafting workshops in early Spring, 2017. Are you interested in planting a rootstock for later grafting to an apple cultivar of your choosing? Please contact us if so, and we’ll put you on the email notification list. You may also want to follow us on twitter (@widespreadmalus) or on facebook (http://www.facebook.com/widespreadmalus).