What do we do when we want to grow different types of apples?  We make new trees! 

Our orchard has an abundant planting of Red Delicious apples, they are very delicious and make fantastic cider, but we wanted to expand our offerings.  Ginger Gold apples are a very early maturing sweet variety that will allow us to attend the grower's markets earlier and with a more varied selection of fruit.  

 

Taking out existing trees and replacing them with new nursery trees of the desired variety is an expensive and time consuming operation.  We chose instead to "top work" some of our mature Red Delicious trees by removing most of the branches and crown grafting the Ginger Gold scion (fruiting) wood on to the branch stubs. 

 Grafted Tree

The results have been nothing short of phenomenal.  Two years after the initial grafts, we are starting to see some fruit blossoms and we have removed all of the remaining Red Delicious branches.  We are expecting these trees to be coming into full production next year!