Yup...graft above the soil line. Not sure how important that is, but it seems to be what is recommended. The problem i see, if you have a situation like the above pics, where you have all this dead wood and then a bunch of leaves at the end...I'm pretty sure that isn't going to fill in over time..as in you will have vast areas of nothing, with growth at the very tops of the tree...which isn't going to work well going forward. My suggestion is just to try to start over down low and get yourself some new growth that is nice and lush....if that is possible. Or drop the tree and start over. What is interesting, is i have some seedling trees here (3 of them) that are 3 years old now and look great..i had very little dieback. Almost like younger trees handled the cold better. What you should have done is last year seeded a bunch of that fruit and now you'd have all kinds of replacements. From what i've seen, they grow pretty true (self pollinating) from seed. I'm guessing here, but i bet seedling trees are probably hardier then grafted trees....although i'm not sure if any real research has shown that.

I would think cut it off,..the only problem what can arise from that is, lots of vigorous new growth and might not harden off properly, if moisture can hold off later in summer you might be OK for hardening off.

Well I got my trees today, I'm going to do a couple things different. 1st I'm going to pot 2 in half whiskey barrels so I can garage them over the winter. The other 2 plus a Starkcrimson cherry hardy to Z5 I'm going to plant close together so I can tent them and even give them a bit of heat on below zero nights and protect the blossoms from late spring frosts. Another thing I know I did wrong last year was fertilize and water too much, too late into the season. This discourages the trees from going into dormancy and makes them much more susceptible to winter damage. So no fertilizer (Stark Bros treprep) after Aug. 1 and really cut back on the water once the worst of the summer heat is over. If these guys don't make it I'll have to stick to apples and berries for fruit. Good luck with yours!

I've used BT, a non-toxic substance derived from a naturally occurring, soil dwelling bacterium, Bacillus thuringiensis, for several years. I highly recommend it. Not only is BT non-toxic to people, and to birds and other wildlife, it has to be ingested to kill, and will only kill caterpillars, because of the way it works on their digestive systems. It won't kill even harm butterfly caterpillars, since they don't eat leaves of trees you'd be spraying for winter moths. The timing needs to be done carefully, since you want to get the cats after they've hatched and before they get too large. Try to pick a cloudy day, since sun breaks down BT. It takes a few days to kill, but apparently the leaf-eating stops almost immediately after they've eaten the stuff. I wouldn't try treating a big tree completely (though you can get the lower branches, where the damage would be most visible), but I've used a pressurized sprayer from the hardware store and been able to adequately treat everything I thought needed help. Dormant oil can be used, too, to smother the eggs, but I think that would have needed to be done earlier in the year - I haven't tried it myself. There are lots of sources of info on line about this, I picked one that looked decent, although it's across the continent, to get you started. Here is a link that might be useful: winter moth factsheet, washington state u