Our first event of the year at the community orchard saw around ten garden enthusiasts join our expert Richard in early March for our first ever budding workshop.
We just caught the right time of year to have a go at reproducing plants using a method called budding. This literally takes a bud from a plant that you want to reproduce, and attaches it to a host plant. If you’re successful, it grows a branch of the original bud plant on the host. Amazing.
We practiced on coprosma (karamu) twigs to learn knife skills – and that Richard’s many thousands of budding experiences made the job look much easier than it actually was. T-budding involved removing a single bud, keeping it clean and slotting it accurately into a t-shaped cut in the host plant. It was tricky. ‘It’s important – safer for you and healthier for the plant – to use a very sharp blade and to hold it correctly,’ said Richard. ‘It makes cutting smoother and avoids sudden movements of the knife.’
Then we moved on to chip budding. This time, we needed to make a cut in the host plant exactly the same shape as the bud it’s about to receive. Sheesh, it needs lots of practice.
We learned words like xylem, phloem and cambium. Matching cambium layers (green layer just inside the bark) on the bud and the host is critical to success.
Friends of the Farm loved that participants brought twigs from their trees at home in the hope that we’d be able to reproduce them. We’re still in the process of creating rootstock, which will become the host plants for our much loved local heritage plums, peaches and apricots, so we couldn’t do this final stage. However, it was the perfect time of year for Richard to remind us to eat Golden Queen peaches, keep the stones in the fridge for six weeks and then plant them. The seedlings which grow will become our host plants or rootstock for next season.
Takeaway messages:
Practice your knife skills by removing buds from coprosma (karamu) plants because that’s an easily accessible and soft branched plant. By the next workshop, you’ll be an expert and ready to grow new trees.
Eat Golden Queen peaches, refrigerate the stones and plant them. If you don’t have space at home, get in touch and we’ll see if we can find space for them.
Don’t worry if you missed it this year; we plan to run another budding workshop in mid-February next year. We’ll be running a grafting workshop in August.
If you’re interested in joining in with our working bees at the community orchard, they are planned for 2-4pm on the first Saturday of the month – next one on Saturday 3 May. Check our website calendar to see what’s happening each time.
More Community Orchard articles
- Community Orchard Budding Workshop
- That’s just peachy!
- 2024 Volunteer Celebration and Thank You
- Autumn Orchard Working Bee – Mulching, Weeding and Feeding
- Locals learn grafting & cutting at community orchard workshop
- Friends of the Farm turns 10!
- FoF Community Orchard Working Bee April 2022
- Grafting progress for heritage tree project
- Caroline and Jane: Everyday Māngere Bridge heroes
