Grafting

Bank holiday! No work today and not on call, so I woke up early and cycled to work the long way round! Actually I didn't forget but I wanted to test a new slightly longer but potentially prettier route out, so I went for a spin on my road bike at eight o'clock. I think it's at least 10 minutes slower to work because of the distance plus a few more minutes for using my hybrid rather than my road bike, but still should make a good route in summer.

After my bike ride I had breakfast and then we went to the Overton Community Orchard to have a go a tree grafting. The main picture and one of the extras are pear blossom, which is utterly covering our pear trees! After staking out one very bendy pear tree we did the grafting.

We have two root stock apple trees that had previously been allowed to grow into mid-sized trees. Last year we tried to graft to one of them and got 4 good grafts out of 7 attempts. This year we tried again, leaving the two root stock trees looking very peculiar, see other extra.

We did simple cleft grafts, and then used bees wax and electricians tape to seal them all up. You can get fancy grafting tape and glue, but it's not really worth it.

When we got home we planted all the trimmed root stock pieces in fresh sand and compost with rooting compound to see if we can get any of them to sprout. If we can, we'll have some of our own root stock to try more grafting onto in future. People always want to do it, but when you advertise doing it almost no one turns up - we got only one volunteer today.

Finally we did a shopping trip - very expensive. There is inflation on lots of things, shrinkflation on others and my new one dispflation - where less common things up a lot instead of common things that you notice. Brexit just keeps giving!

Now it's time to do my French homework, that I did yesterday but left at work!