At least no blood.

Oh, I feel your pain having recently removed the t-bud sprouts on 2 trees budded last year while removing the rootstock sprouts. Can't believe I did that, they didn't look at all like the rootstock buds!!! And this was after splitting 2 scaffold limbs on one 3rd leaf apple tree while limb bending.

Just a wonderful afternoon it was.

Grrrs!

Yeah, I've pruned freshly made grafts, snapped branches clean off while "training" (well, at least they never did it again ...) broken grafts, you name it. Drawn blood, too.

My favorite errors? To lose the labels on my grafts, or fail to permanently label a viable graft because I assume too early that it failed. Last year some of my labels blew off or were stolen (tree is right on the boulevard) and there were a couple that I thought were dead that surprised me, bless their little dormant buds. So I have several "permanent" labels that have five different names on them, as I'm hoping to figure it out after they finally bear someday.

And last week I was carefully nipping a scion to size and clipped my hand. Just not paying enough attention to all the details, ay?

:-)M

The windstorm we are now having has snapped several grafts off. Bummer but I did do two of each variety so not a total loss. The low temps with this storm are forecast to be 38 tonight and Monday night, very low for this time of the year. I expect areas further north of NYC with have moderate to severe frost damage.

The mistakes wouldn't bother me so much if it could be blamed on youthful exuberance and a total lack of experience in things horticultural, those days are long gone. I did learn one thing about the tree with the split limbs that may help others in the future - it is Roxbury Russet. The 6 varieties I was spreading on that day are all 3rd leaf and on the same rootstock. I treated them all the same as far as how much tension was being applied to the limbs and used the same spreaders and tying methods. Apparently, Roxbury Russet can't handle the limb bending stress that the others can.