A Few Notes on My Apple Grafting Plans, 2026 Edition

Grafting season is almost upon us, and this year I’m planning to graft no fewer than forty eight new apple trees. They’re all going onto M9 rootstock¹They arrived today from Walcot Organic Nursery and they are looking very good indeed; nice, consistent thickness with a handy bit of variation, which will allow for working with different sizes of scion. for planting out as cordon trees down on the allotment in a year, or maybe two. I’m going to graft two trees of twenty four varieties, because I’m a cautious chap, so I like to have a backup in case one fails, and it’s always nice to have a few spares to share around.

Speaking of scions, batches of those have been arriving all week, from folks up and down the country with whom I’ve been setting up scion-swaps, or who have extremely kindly sent them along just because they know I’d be interested in growing them. And some very interesting varieties I’ve been sent, too.

Several of them are russets – my favourite general type of apple – including ‘Sykehouse Russet’, which has come from the restored walled garden at Wortley Hall (thank you Jane!), ‘Puckrupp Pippin’, which has been sent up from Tetbury (thank you Philip!) and ‘Golden Harvey’, which I picked up yesterday from a fellow fruit fanatic in Stockport along with ‘Karmijn de Sonnaville’, a russet-ish apple that’s meant to be very highly regarded in the flavour stakes (thank you Luke!).

My old mate Stewart (apple grower, soft fruit breeder, and well worth following @stewartwaine on BlueSky) sent me a seedling that (i.i.r.c.) he collected from his neck of the Midlands woods and named ‘Fennel Sensation’, due to its distinct fennel-esque flavour earlier in the season (thank you Stewart!). A couple more seedling scions have been sent up by Rich in South Wales, which he collected from wildling trees growing on the coast near where he lives. He’s dubbed them ‘Merthyr Mawr’ and ‘Tusker’, and I’m looking forward to trying both of them, along with red-fleshed ‘Almata’ and deep, red coloured ‘Liberty’ (thank you Rich!).

The folks at Bernwode Fruit Trees were able to supply me with a few scions of ‘Iffley Beefing’ – which I’m ridiculously excited about, as it’s a fourth, currently-available ‘Beefing’ type apple that I had no idea existed until a few weeks ago – so big thanks to them, and I picked up ‘Ananas Reinette’ – which I hope will turn out to have a ‘Pitmaston Pine Apple’-esque flavour, rather than anything too full-on pineapple-ish – at the Fruit Moot in Sheffield last week.

Those scions account for almost half of my grafting plans, and the rest will be made up with a few varieties I’d like to add to my own collection from the orchards at work: ‘Catshead’, ‘Court of Wick’, ‘Lucombe’s Pine’, ‘Ten Commandments’, ‘Withington Welter’, ‘Ribston Pippin’, and I have a couple on the reserve list; ‘James Grieve’ and ‘Worcester Pearmain’, which are just good apples to have in any collection (but if something a bit more exciting comes along, then I might just have to bump them back down the list).

I’ll also be making a few more backup trees of my beloved Beefings, ‘Herefordshire’ and ‘Norfolk’ (I already have a couple of strong-looking trees of ‘Striped’, so I think I’m okay on that front), and I’d like to graft another ‘Herefordshire Russet’ as well. I’ve also promised to graft a couple of ‘Crispin’ (‘Mutsu’) from the tree in my neighbour’s garden, for a friend who’s expressed an interest in that one. It’s a good, tasty apple if kept on the tree until December, as I discovered last year, so I might just add one to my plot as well.

I expect I’ll be using various grafting methods, depending on the thickness of the scion-wood I’ve got to work with, but I expect I’ll stick to the simple and speedy z-grafting method that I’ve used with a pretty good success rate for the past couple of years, especially if the scions are on the thinner side. Whip and/or²Pretty much every modern source calls it “whip and tongue” but some of the older, eighteenth and nineteenth century books call it “whip, or tongue”, which might suggest that at some point the two names for the same method became conflated? tongue might come out of retirement if the thickness of the scion/rootstock combination suggests it’s a good idea. And if I have any particularly slender scions then I might even cleft graft them into some of the thicker stocks that are left over from last year. I’ll be playing it by ear, switching things around as I go. As I now have one of those mini action cameras, I might even film a grafting session or two.³And, who knows, maybe even work out how to edit and post the results. Stranger things have happened, eh?

Right then, those are my grafting plans for the 2026 season, and I can’t wait to get started. First I need to plant out the best of last year’s successful new trees, and pot-up the spares, and/or ones that need a bit more growing-on time before they’re ready for planting out. Then I’ll need to renew the growing medium in the nursery bed, ready to receive this year’s new trees. I reckon I’m going to have a busy, productive and thoroughly enjoyable few weeks.

How about you? Are you grafting a few trees this year, or a few dozen? Or have you run out of growing room? Which grafting methods have you used in the past, and which ones do you prefer now? Do let me know, via the comments.

Footnotes

• 1
  They arrived today from Walcot Organic Nursery and they are looking very good indeed; nice, consistent thickness with a handy bit of variation, which will allow for working with different sizes of scion. ↩︎
• 2
  Pretty much every modern source calls it “whip and tongue” but some of the older, eighteenth and nineteenth century books call it “whip, or tongue”, which might suggest that at some point the two names for the same method became conflated? ↩︎
• 3
  And, who knows, maybe even work out how to edit and post the results. Stranger things have happened, eh? ↩︎