In March sometime, our son Conrad did a hard prune on our old apple tree. We estimate that it is probably around 40 years old and hasn't been given a trim for a couple of years.
Then at the end of March, he received 17 different apple scions (shoots of original apple trees) that he had ordered from the Salt Spring Apple Company (which grows over 400 varieties of apples on their farm on Salt Spring Island). He waited for a nice day, weather-wise, warm and sunny, and spent an hour or two using a special grafting tape to wire these little twigs (what they looked like to me) to the branches around the tree.
He labeled each sion with fridge tape first, and then with metal tags he made from aluminum pop tins and twist-tied them to the branches with their scion. The aluminum tags will continue to be readable after rain (and we live in a rainy area).
Each apple variety will (ideally) sprout its own little sideways-growing tree, probably in a year or so. The plan forward is to nurture the best grafts and likely to add some more of the successful scions, that is, the ones that produce good apples.
I'm not so sure we will have 17 different types of apples growing off this tree, but I guess I will see if that happens or not. I will put a video/short on my organicgrannydotcom youtube site when anything of note happens, and likely on here as well.
And yes, of course, one of the apple varieties is Granny Smith.
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