Our Services
Contract Grown Trees
Countryside Farm and Nurseries custom grows fruit trees for orchards, cideries, and other commercial operations. Instead of contacting a generic nursery and hoping they have the varieties you want in the quantities you need, you choose the rootstock and variety of tree, and we grow them specifically for you. The result? You get the exact tree that performs best for your operation.
We regularly grow apples, cherries, peaches, pears, and plums, but we also handle unusual requests. Whether it’s modern, an heirloom, or your backyard favorite, we’ve got it covered when it comes to rootstocks, scion wood, and grafting techniques such as chip budding, whip grafts, and even interstem grafts.
What sets us apart? We thoroughly discuss your needs—and deliver a high-quality tree, in the variety designed for your business, that will flourish in the conditions of your farm or orchard.
Countryside Farm and Nurseries custom grows fruit trees for orchards, cideries, and other commercial operations. Instead of contacting a generic nursery and hoping they have the varieties you want in the quantities you need, you choose the rootstock and variety of tree, and we grow them specifically for you. The result? You get the exact tree that performs best for your operation.
We regularly grow apples, cherries, peaches, pears, and plums, but we also handle unusual requests. Whether it’s modern, an heirloom, or your backyard favorite, we’ve got it covered when it comes to rootstocks, scion wood, and grafting techniques such as chip budding, whip grafts, and even interstem grafts.
What sets us apart? We thoroughly discuss your needs—and deliver a high-quality tree, in the variety designed for your business, that will flourish in the conditions of your farm or orchard.
Our steps:
Step 1: Choosing the right rootstock
Rootstock can affect how well a tree grows in a wide range of orchard conditions. The type selected is based on several characteristics, including:
• The size of the finished tree desired
• How it performs in your soil and climate
• How well it imparts disease resistance
• How well it pairs with your desired variety
Step 2: Choosing your scion wood
The variety of scion wood selected is based on your farm operation’s sales needs.
Step 3: Grafting
Once the rootstock has grown on our farm for a season, we bud graft the chosen variety of scion wood to it.
Step 4: Final stages and delivery
Over the following season, the new bud is trained into a tree, and once it’s dormant for winter, we deliver it to your location.
Step 1: Choosing the right rootstock
Rootstock can affect how well a tree grows in a wide range of orchard conditions. The type selected is based on several characteristics, including:
• The size of the finished tree desired
• How it performs in your soil and climate
• How well it imparts disease resistance
• How well it pairs with your desired variety
Step 2: Choosing your scion wood
The variety of scion wood selected is based on your farm operation’s sales needs.
Step 3: Grafting
Once the rootstock has grown on our farm for a season, we bud graft the chosen variety of scion wood to it.
Step 4: Final stages and delivery
Over the following season, the new bud is trained into a tree, and once it’s dormant for winter, we deliver it to your location.
Field Grafting
Field grafting (also known as top grafting or topworking) allows us to take an existing healthy orchard and graft a new variety of fruit to each tree. This is usually done for apples, but can also be done for peaches, plums, and pears.
Consider this example. Perhaps your orchard has been growing for the past ten or fifteen years. You’ve spent considerable labor and money purchasing, planting, training, and caring for these trees to keep them healthy and productive. Unfortunately, the variety of fruit you grow has fallen from popularity and you wish you could grow a more profitable variety. To do that without grafting, you’d have to cut down and uproot healthy trees, let the soil sit empty for at least a year, then purchase and replant new trees, then retrain them—a process requiring a minimum of seven years before you are picking the optimal amount of fruit, not to mention all those years of high expense, no production, and no income.
With field grafting, the branches of your existing trees are cut off, and scion wood (small branches) from more desirable varieties are grafted onto them. This is done in early spring when the sap is first rising. The new grafts are allowed to grow the first year and then trained back into scaffolds the second year. By the third year, you’re harvesting at full production again. We also come back the second year to show you how to train the new grafts.
Countryside Farm and Nurseries is the only operation to perform this on-site service commercially on the east coast. We will thoroughly discuss your needs and the viability of the varieties you desire.
Field grafting (also known as top grafting or topworking) allows us to take an existing healthy orchard and graft a new variety of fruit to each tree. This is usually done for apples, but can also be done for peaches, plums, and pears.
Consider this example. Perhaps your orchard has been growing for the past ten or fifteen years. You’ve spent considerable labor and money purchasing, planting, training, and caring for these trees to keep them healthy and productive. Unfortunately, the variety of fruit you grow has fallen from popularity and you wish you could grow a more profitable variety. To do that without grafting, you’d have to cut down and uproot healthy trees, let the soil sit empty for at least a year, then purchase and replant new trees, then retrain them—a process requiring a minimum of seven years before you are picking the optimal amount of fruit, not to mention all those years of high expense, no production, and no income.
With field grafting, the branches of your existing trees are cut off, and scion wood (small branches) from more desirable varieties are grafted onto them. This is done in early spring when the sap is first rising. The new grafts are allowed to grow the first year and then trained back into scaffolds the second year. By the third year, you’re harvesting at full production again. We also come back the second year to show you how to train the new grafts.
Countryside Farm and Nurseries is the only operation to perform this on-site service commercially on the east coast. We will thoroughly discuss your needs and the viability of the varieties you desire.
