About
Jamie Cummins, owner, orchardist, gardener
My name is Jamie Cummins. The Cummins family has long been immersed in and sustained by orchards. I am proud to take this family history and wealth of knowledge into my own practices. Pursuing my education in agriculture and ecology through a Bachelor of Science degree in Agroecology I gained an academic understanding of the world I had grown up in. In the years following, I worked in Organic row crop agriculture, Organic orchards, small scale mail order nurseries, and conventional orchards and nurseries. After years of working in the industry, I started JC Pruning and Gardening to bring my experiences into the home orchard and garden. My emphasis is on site adapted perennial gardens, fruit bearing shrubs and trees in the small home orchard, and vegetable gardens.
Grafting
Grafting is the age old practice of duplicating a fruit or nut variety by joining a twig (scion) to a rooting part (rootstock) of the same species. Most fruit and nut species’ seeds are not true to type. This means that if you were to take seed from your favorite apple variety and plant it, the fruit that tree would produce would not be the same as the fruit the seed came from. Apples have one the largest genomes of any food plant. Each apple seeds’ genetics have been reshuffled. At one point there were around 14,000 known apple varieties in North America. We have lost many of them due to industrial agriculture and count around only 1,500 varieties. The small little farms have been replaced and their apple varieties lost. However there is an heirloom apple resurgence, largely in the Northeast, but also here in Washington State, to hunt down apple varieties thought to have gone extinct.
Grafting is the only way to preserve a variety, such as the famed old apple Lady, possibly from Roman times. Grafting is done in late winter; it is the process of taking dormant wood of last year’s growth (scion wood), making a couple special cuts and joining it to rootstock with the same cuts. The cambium (vascular tissue) then heals together and one of the dormant buds on you scion wood will grow into your new tree bearing the same fruit you took the scion wood from. This growth happens over the growing season and by next late winter your tree is ready to plant. Rootstock has been selected for its rooting purposes. Size, disease resistance, and cold hardiness are all factors to consider when choosing rootstock to graft scionwood onto. It’s a magical process that humans have used since before the dawn of agriculture. There are various ways to graft. Bench grafting is what I have described above. Top-working is when you take an existing tree and either add a variety or change it over completely. Chip Budding is done in the summer with new growth. For custom trees I typically use the bench grafting method done in late spring, my experience shows me this has the highest success rate.
My emphasis is on heirloom varieties and introducing people to fruit they have never tried and can’t access in the grocery store.