Many of our customers know the nursery at Cloud Mountain Farm Center for our fruit trees. Because 2020 shut down our workshop series, we did not have the opportunity to offer our classes on fruit tree grafting and summer chip bud grafting. We did spend some time videoing our crew during chip bud season, and put together a little tutorial on how we propagate and grow fruit trees.

It takes almost 18 months from chip bud to sales yard to produce a tree. The rootstock is chip budded in August and planted in the field in late September. The next spring, the bud pushes and is trained over the summer into a new tree. After the trees go dormant in the fall, they are tagged, dug, graded, and moved to the nursery for sales starting in February. A tree budded in August of 2020 will be for sale in the nursery in February of 2022.