Every apple seed is a unique individual. Sowing seeds from apples that you like, more often than not, will give you a tree that bears fruit unlike its parent. So just about every cultivated apple that you have likely eaten comes from an ancient practice known as grafting.
At Blue Bee Cider, we conduct bench grafting workshops in early spring. One of the key ingredients to a successful bench graft is a young branch, or scionwood, from the apple tree that you want, which is grafted onto the root system of another apple tree. The first time I heard Charlotte Shelton at Albemarle CiderWorks mention the word, the context was one that made scionwood sound mystical and important all at once. This was a word whose meaning every cidermaker must know.
Charlotte’s brother, Bill, taught me how to spot scionwood, collect it, store it, and ultimately how to it graft with it. I like to collect scionwood in our urban orchard a day or two after a big snowfall. It is a good excuse to get out in the snow with a purpose, when all the world is quiet. If you have an apple tree at home, go out right now (mid-winter) and look for scions. In a nutshell, they tend to be narrow and reddish in appearance compared with older branches on the tree. Be careful to avoid water sprouts which share these characteristics but grow perpendicular on a horizontal limb.
Even though our urban orchard is quite small, Blue Bee Cider generates quite a bit of scionwood. I organize bunches of little twigs into our empty cider bottle boxes, writing the name of the apple on each carton section as I go. Another option is to just tape them together and label the tape before reorganizing and storing them later. I try to avoid taping the scions so that I don’t injure them. Every inch is precious! Either way, the branches are brought inside then sorted, bagged, and labeled before storing in the crisper of the fridge for a couple of months.
If you already have apple trees, go out there and get your scions! A posting on grafting will follow later on. In the meantime, this is my punchlist for scionwood collecting:
- · Orchard map to know which trees are which
- · Newly sharpened pruners
- · Marker
- · Freezer tape for bundling branches (optional)
- · Empty cider bottle boxes
- · Wagon to hold it all together
- · Large plastic storage bags without ziptop closures to avoid injuring the scions
- · Masking tape for closing storage bags
- · Digital camera to remind me of concerns for major pruning later
-Courtney Mailey
