Nearly done with all the apple tree grafts!

 The phantom planters native Irish apple tree nursery is nearly full. We only have another 50 apple trees to graft up and that'll be 320 for this year.

Will just be a waiting game now to see how many take to their new rootstock.

This is my first time ever doing this but its something I'm going to master and create all our own native apple trees grown here in Belfast.

For anyone that doesn't really understand grafting, it's a process were you take a cutting from say a granny smith apple tree and you piece it on to a branch of another apple tree which is called grafting.

This is best done this time of year when the sap is rising in the trees and the leaves are beginning to appear, the sap connects the 2 pieces together and the granny smith cutting you took will keep on growing into a granny smith tree.

You do this as if you were to take a granny smith seed and grow it up depending on what it pollinates with and many other factors the seed may not be a granny smith tree, it could be a crab apple or a cooking apple.

So you get the rootstock of crab apple trees and graft on the the branches of a granny smith when young and the whole tree will grow into a granny smith apple tree.

Sometimes below the graft line the old tree variety grows out but you just keep pruning this off if it does and in a few years it will just grow into the perfect granny smith apple tree.

Its believed you can only graft apple trees with apple, pear with other types of pears and plums with say damsons etc.

It's such an interesting thing to learn about and I've still much to learn myself about the process, lots does not makes sense to me about how they get different types of rootstocks.

You see there are different types of rootstocks also and they determine the size the tree will grow.

We are using mm106 which is semi vigorous meaning the trees will grow to a decent size in your garden say 5 metres.

Then you can get dwarf rootstocks which means the tree will stay small.

It's all a pretty amazing process.

I've got a little plan in my head, if all goes good for me and I build up my patreon subscriptions to a nice little wage for me, my long term plan is to create 1000 native Irish apple trees a year for phantom planting around the streets and estates of Belfast and beyond and also give many out to the likes of schools and communities.

Me and my inner council Paramili-Trees could easily manage this every year.

I've jumped in on many ideas of mine most of my life and got sucked into mayhem with them, made so many mistakes and learned never to spread myself too thin again.

One thousand apple trees phantom planted every year for the rest of my life I know I can maintain and enjoy and is a great contribution to the community and nature.

Going to be like Mr Miyagi one day!

If you'd like to support me I've setup a Patreon account where you can subscribe for £3.50 a month, this way I sort of know where I stand each month money ways and can plan some some stuff or you can donate with the paypal link also and you can setup a monthly payment for as much as you like on there.

https://paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=FAJZHB3TBXMSL...

https://www.patreon.com/ThePhantomPlanter...

I would really appreciate all your help guys

Thank you to everyone thats supported me so far and my apologies for not getting back to any of the messages, I really have a lots going on.

#phantomplanter #communityspirit #paramilitrees

I Challenge you to phantom plant a tree!