By Zoë Bradbury
April 10, 2008
Grafting is the process of joining one thing to another, of taking two things that do not share a natural relationship or affinity for each other — and making them one.
In one barn, my sister Abby is grafting a hundred apple trees and as many plums and pears for the new orchard we’re planting along the creek. In the other barn where a ewe has given birth to a stillborn, a neighbor is trying to graft on an orphan lamb to make use of the ewe’s full udder. Both of them need knives to do it.
Matching apple scion to rootstock, my sister makes a careful cut to each, aligns cambium with cambium, and wraps the graft with an elastic band, urging the two halves of the new tree to fuse. Apples don’t come true from seed, so grafting is the only way to produce a proven variety.
Step One: Choose a well adapted rootstock. Step Two: Choose fruitwood varieties for pie, cider, storage and fresh eating apples. In western Oregon, look for scab-resistant varieties. Step Three: In the winter, take green cuttings of the fruitwood and order your rootstock from a nursery or dig it up. Step Four: Marry them together. Step Five: Wait five years, then feast.
Our neighbor, Wendy, takes the stillborn lamb behind the barn and skins it. She returns with the fresh hide and uses a scrap of bailing twine to tie it onto the back of the orphan lamb like a cloak. The stillborn was black. The orphan is white. The ewe doesn’t distinguish because she has evolved to recognize her young primarily by scent, not by sight.
She will reject the lamb if it doesn’t smell like her own — head-butt it, refuse to let it nurse — but wearing the stillborn’s skin, this orphan lamb has a chance. To help convince the ewe, Wendy ties her up in a pen and guides the lamb to the udder.
On the workbench, our entire orchard is laid out with names like Cox’s Orange Pippin, Northern Spy, Stayman Winesap, Goldrush, King. It seems barely possible that this collection of little dormant sticks welded together with rubber bands could be something more than campfire kindling, but it is. Even more unlikely is that in that millimeter of space between scionwood and rootstock, new cells will grow and multiply and bridge the gap. They will, and each tree in our orchard will have a scar — a bulge low to the ground — to prove it.
The next day, I look in on Wendy’s ewe. She is untied, eating alfalfa pellets in the pen. The lamb is uncloaked, white again — and nursing on a full, warm teat.
Zoë Bradbury is a Kellogg Food & Society Policy Fellow. She lives, writes, and farms on Oregon’s southern coast.
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