Recommend my next apple tree?

[nickdub]

I've actually come across quite a lot of videos on Cleft and Bark grafting once I found out the terms and people say apples are very forgiving of grafting. It seems you're supposed to leave a branch though, I think this is to keep drawing sap. Seems likely to end up looking pretty ugly though. Might give it a try just for fun.

These are old techniques date back 100's of years, I came across them by reading old books on gardening and fruit growing. One thing that is obvious is that gardeners in the past were in less of a hurry than people generally are nowadays. In Victorian times say there were no dwarfing rootstocks being used and so an apple tree grown from a pip (pippin) could easily take 10 years before it fruited and any mature fruit tree would be 20 years old or more.

If you had apple rootstocks in your orchard grafting not only gave you control of the variety of apple, but actually meant relatively fast production for the period, say 5 years between setting the graft and having it fruit. As modern life has become faster paced, available time to do things seems to have shrunk - odd really.

[d000hg]

I guess digging up an old tree is also no small job if you want to get all the roots. Grafting is pretty amazing when you think about it.