I have an apple tree in my front yard.  I’m not sure what rootstock it’s on, but it’s a dwarfing  variety.  The upper is a Northern Spy cultivar.  I recently grafted on scions of four other heirloom varieties- Pound Sweet, Sweet Sixteen, Smokehouse, and Pitmaston Pineapple.

Apple trees, like many fruits do not reproduce true from seed.  You have to buy a tree that is “grafted” (think Frankenstein’s Monster) using a “scion” of wood from another tree of that variety.  That’s right- EVERY Red Delicious apple tree in the world is a clone of the original tree.  People took cuttings from it and attached those to other trees.  That’s how you get trees like the one on the right from Amazon.com.

What I’m trying to do is to turn my tree into a multivarietal, but with heirloom varieties.  I don’t have room for a whole orchard, but I need at least two varieties just to produce fruit- apples aren’t usually self-fertile.

With the exception of the Sweet Sixteen cultivar, I selected all of them for a particular reason, which is that I like them:

Pound Sweet produces large fruits that under ideal conditions are almost melon-like in their texture, fine-grained, very juicy, and mild.

Smokehouse produces average-sized fruits with a faint smoky hint in the taste.

Pitmaston Pineapple produces small, russeted fruits that have a tropical twang to them.

I ordered all of the scionwood from FedCo Seeds in Maine.  The scions came in and I grafted them.  Grafting wax is probably the stickiest substance I’ve ever encountered, by the way.  Of course, I’m a total N00b when it comes to apple tree grafting.

Now, about a month later, the scions aren’t leafing out.  Strangely, the trunk of the tree is.  I’m afraid to cut back the trunk sprouts because I don’t want to kill the tree, but I want to encourage it to focus on the scions.

I used my fingernail to scrape a tiny part of the bark on each scion.  All of the scions have a green cambium layer, which suggests they are still alive.  That said, the remaining Northern Spy branch is really droopy, so I don’t know if it is suffering from low hydrostatic pressure or what.  I’m loath to kill the sprouts, lest I kill the tree.  But, I need the tree to refocus on the scions and the Northern Spy branch..

As you can see, the trunk sprouts are quite vigorous, so I need to trim them soon.  The question is WHEN?