The grafting lesson.. the way you do the things you do.
It’s Easter in the orchard. Cold and gray and rainy. The first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring Equinox. Sometimes that date can be in March when the ground is frozen and covered with snow. Other years it comes in late April. On Easter Sunday 1981 I planted seven apple trees I had been given by a friend in trade for helping him plant his orchard a few days earlier. I was so excited! Easter was April 19th that year, and it was sunny, breezy and warm. I was up at 6 AM, and although the earth was cold, the frost was out and the digging was perfect. Of those seven trees, one actually survived my long-ago inexperience and is still doing well. It now has about a dozen varieties grafted onto it—a library of some of my early favorite apples.
One of my childhood Easter memories is of an egg hunt when I was 6 or 7 years old. We were at a neighbors’ and the eggs were the regulation hard-boiled type. No chocolate. I was on my hands and knees under a hedge when I found the egg. I carefully placed it into my little basket wondering to myself, “Why am I doing this?”
Why do we do the things we do? Or as the Temptations put it, “the way you do the things you do!” Maybe we do it because it’s spring again for the gazillionth time, the earth and the plants are waking up, and it’s the perfect time to plant seeds, graft new trees and marvel at all that is alive.
This Easter we celebrated by helping friends graft an apple that originated on their farm. It was started from a seed by their son who named it the Snake. We brought ten rootstocks, tape, grafting compound (aka Treekote) and a knife. I grafted the first five trees while Steve watched, and then he grafted five more. We ended the grafting lesson in time for a resurrection of sorts where last summer’s bounty that had been buried in sawdust in the root cellar for 6 months was transformed into a delicious dinner. It was an Easter miracle. (No hard-boiled eggs in sight.) It was the perfect way to spend Easter.