Grafting and a Couple of Holes

It is Sunday after Stake Conference which was really good. I decided to update our blog again. No, I am not going bore you with this daily but I want to get in the habit of keeping it up.

For months Deborah has been studying about grafting limbs into other trees. She has been doing this since last fall. We have this crabapple tree in our back yard. It is a beautiful tree in the fall as you can see by the picture but the apples taste terrible. She has always loved the strawberry crabapples that have grown on her mother's tree when she was growing up. Deborah decided that she would graft some twigs from that crabapple to our crabapple tree. Kind of like the story in Jacob of the Book of Mormon.

Saturday, Deborah decided that that was the day to do this. We started out by going to Deborah's parents where Deborah started cutting off new starts from the branches of the strawberry crab.

We then took the branches home and Deborah went to work on our crabapple tree. She started the major surgery by cutting off the limbs of the tree where we were grafting the new twigs to.

She then cut a slit in the end of the stub and inserted two of the twigs into the slit and then covered it with a tree paste that is supposed to help in the healing.

You can see the progress in the pictures and the final is the after shot of our now new strawberry crabapple tree. Compare it with the initial picture and there is a big change.

I wasn't near as industrious as Deborah. I did get the ledger board for our deck attached to the house and the two holes dug for the foundations of the posts to our deck. Friday I unloaded the wood for the deck out of the pickup and stacked in back to where the deck will be. Remember the deck is only 6'x6' so it is not very large. We are going to have some pavers by the deck to be a patio in our herb garden.