Good news from the frameworked pear trees --- the first of the scionwood has broken dormancy, with the rest hopefully soon to follow.  I'm not 100% positive, but I'm pretty sure if scionwood breaks dormancy, that means the graft has taken.  (As opposed to hardwood cuttings where bud break can actually be a bad sign if the cuttings wake up before they manage to root.)

As you can see, the pear trees have leafed out quite a bit more below the graft union than above, which is quite ordinary.  When you graft onto one-year-old rootstock pieces, you're often told to brush off the opening buds on the rootstock if they wake up before the scionwood has budded out, but that doesn't seem to be as good of an idea on a large, frameworked tree.  If all goes well, I'll let everything grow this summer, then prune back the limbs of the old variety this winter, letting the new varieties take over a bit at a time.  Maybe we'll have extra-tasty pears to enjoy in a few years.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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