Here are your photos:

These don't really look like they were all cleft grafted though. Since it appears that there are four limbs in a straight row, maybe the middle two were cleft grafted and then the others were bud grafted. I don't know exactly what happened here, but it looks like the result of very poor grafting work.

there is a fruit forum ... and i have never seen the experts there.. in this forum.. though i do not care where you post ...

i agree they are doomed.. as was my 5 in 1 pear ... which quickly became a 4 in 1.. then 3 in one..

the basic problem i found.. was that i was severely limited as to proper pruning.. due to the multiple varieties ... in other words ... it there were two crossing branches.. odds were.. i could not remove one.. or i would be removing that whole variety ...

i finally got irritated enough to prune it at soil surface.. with malice .. and a sprinkling of roundup ...

ken

I just don't believe a commercial nursery would use the cleft craft to make a combination apple tree. Al

Agree...it's probably some know it all home job.

Thank you everyone for your responses.

From 1970 until 1997 (the merger year in which Sandoz and CIBA became Novartis and I became retired) I worked for Zoecon and its successor firms. The tree in the photo was one of two trees from a local commercial nursery that the biochemistry department purchased for use in a plant metabolism study on hexadecyl cyclopropanecarboxylate, a candidate miticide. A quick search for publications says that the work was done in the late 1970's. The original labels were discarded. The 5 original varieties were probably golden delicious, transparent, red delicious, gravenstein, and McIntosh. Over the last 13 seasons it has been top worked with over 150 antique varieties from scions found at the Santa Clara Valley California Rare Fruit Growers annual scion exchanges.

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