The Apple Row Along My Uncle’s Lane

A Winter in the Garage

Scion wood has to stay cold and damp and dormant until you graft it. Thirty-four degrees is about right. Freezing is bad, and drying out is worse.

We have an old refrigerator in the garage that Curt keeps his pop and his venison in.

I cleared out the bottom shelf and put the bags in the back. Then I taped a note on the door in big letters.

“Do not put apples in here.”

Curt read it and laughed. “Why not apples? It is an apple farm.”

“Apples give off a gas that wakes up buds,” I told him. “Ethylene. Grandpa told me. If you keep scion wood next to apples, it thinks it is spring and pushes out. Then it is ruined.”

He took the bag of Honeycrisp out of the crisper drawer that very minute and carried it into the house. He never said another word about it. That is the kind of man Curt is.

All winter, I checked those bags once a week. I misted the paper towels when they started to dry.

Twice I found a stick going moldy and threw it out. By March I had thirty-eight good ones.

In January I ordered rootstock from a nursery supply house. I picked a semi-standard root that gives a strong, deep-rooted tree on Ridge clay.

They came to three dollars and ten cents apiece, and I ordered forty, plus shipping.

Curt saw the receipt on the counter. “A hundred and thirty-some dollars for sticks with roots,” he said.

“For Grandpa’s trees,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “I was just saying the number out loud.” He went out and bought me a new grafting knife the next week without being asked.

The Tailgate

The rootstock came the second week of March, bare-root, wrapped in wet wood shavings.

I did my grafting the old way, outside, on the tailgate of my mother’s truck, parked in her yard with the sun on it.

It was thirty-nine degrees and bright. Maren sat on an overturned bucket next to me with the roll of grafting tape and a bag of rubber bands, and she was the most serious assistant any woman ever had.

I had not grafted alone since Grandpa died. I want to say that out loud, because people think of grit as something loud.

Sometimes grit is a woman sitting on a cold tailgate with her hands shaking a little, making the first cut anyway.

The first cut was bad. The angle wandered, and the face was not flat. I tossed it into the bucket and took a fresh stick. Maren looked at me.

“Did you mess up?”

“I did,” I said. “Great-Grandpa used to say a bad cut is free. A bad graft costs you a tree. So you throw out the bad cut.”

The second one was clean. Long slanting cut, tongue, lock them together, check the green against the green.

Then I handed it to Maren, and she wrapped the tape around the union, snug, the way I showed her, from the bottom up.

“Is this how Great-Grandpa did it?” she asked.

“Exactly how,” I said. “On a tailgate, just like this.”

She wrapped another one, and then she said, without looking up, “Do you think he can see us?”

I had to stop and put the knife down. I sat there with my hands in my lap, and the sun was warm on the back of my coat, and a pair of sandhill cranes went over the field making that rattling sound they make every spring.

“I think he would be very proud of your wrapping,” I said, when I could. “He was always very particular about the wrapping.”

We did forty grafts that day. I counted them twice. Maren wrote numbers on little aluminum tags with a ballpoint pen, pressing so hard the numbers came through on the back, and we wired a tag onto every one.

Afterward, we packed them in damp sawdust in a big plastic tub in Mom’s cellar to callus, the warm end down.

Three weeks later, I lifted them, and I could see the little white ridges of callus growing across the unions.

Thirty-one took. Thirty-one of forty. Grandpa used to say if you got three out of four, you were a grafter. I sat on the cellar step and laughed out loud.