Surgery

This afternoon's propagation class presented me with two opportunities to practice my surgical skills.  The first opportunity was planned and involved bench grafting of a fruit tree, in this case grafting a 20th-Century Asian Pear onto EMLA 27 rootstock.  The rootstock was ordered by mail, but the asian pear scion I harvested myself from a one-year-old asian pear tree growing in one of the farm's orchards. 

Why graft?  Many fruit trees do not breed true; that is, if you plant their seeds, you may get a tree with fruit very different from the parent tree.  So if I have a 20th-Century Asian Pear tree and want another tree with the same delicious fruit, planting a seed from one of my pears won't get me what I want.  Instead, I need to graft.  Grafting, or what I'm calling tree surgery, involves transplanting a piece of the fruiting tree you want to propagate (called a scion) onto a rootstock with desirable characteristics.  The rootstock I used, EMLA 27, has the desirable characteristic of dwarfing trees, keeping them small (just right for backyards, which is where I'm planning to put mine!) 

There are several ways to do a graft, but the basic concept is to align the cambial layers (actively dividing layer of cells just inside the bark) of the scion and the rootstock.  To do this, you need the two ends you are joining to be of the same caliber.  For my graft, I simply made an angled cut on each piece and lined up the two cuts.  This is called a splice graft.  Then I taped the two pieces together with a stretchy grafting tape and wished my new tree good luck!

  

My grafted tree

My second surgery experience of the day was not planned, (and it wasn't actually surgery, but I did get to use the wound care skills I learned as a surgery intern, so I'm counting it!)  One of my fellow apprentices cut his hand with a grafting knife, and I provided first aid.  The cut was relatively superficial, so no stitches needed--just some cleaning, direct pressure, steri-strips, and gauze.  It felt good to use my doctor skills, and nice to know that those med school loans I'm still paying back didn't go to waste.