In the spring of 2012, I attempted to graft a Pear scion onto my apple tree using Winter Banana Apple as an inter stem. (All of he grafting i do is "Whip and Tongue" grafts wrapped in grafting tape. I then coat the wrapped union with grafting wax) The parent branch was a Winesap Apple branch with a grafted Winter Banana Apple scion from a few years before. (I actually have two of these paired branches.) I then attempted to graft two "Kieffer" Pear scions onto my two Winter Banana Apple inter stems. The "Kieffer" Pear scions started to grow, but died a few weeks later. This spring (2014) I attempted to graft this Apple / Pear union again using the same Winter Banana Apple inter stems. I had just enough branch on my Winter Banana branches to try this experiment one more time. This time around, I used "Sunrise Pear" scionwood. The grafting was a screaming success! (I had enough "Sunrise Pear" scionwood to graft two branches onto my apple tree, and two more onto an ornamental pear. All four pear grafts were a success!) I have no idea why this experiment failed in 2012 and was a success in 2014. I do not know if it had to do with the pear variety used, or if it had to do with environmental circumstances. I will re-post in 2015 with an update. There are a few different treads on this subject so I will be re-posting on those threats also. Below are pictures taken on 07/27/2014.

Of the four Asians that I planted, back in '96: Chojuro is #1 - big, pretty fruits with great flavor, doesn't tend to overbear as much as the others. Shinko - close second. Heavy bearer, and needs thinning, but even without thinning the fruits size up pretty good(and will break branches), good flavor, but not as good as Chojuro. Niitaka - really overbears, and fruits will not size if you don't thin. Usually lacking in flavor - plenty of juice, but just sweet, with little character; they were good last year, but this year just so-so. Korean Giant/Don Bae - a real 'dog' for me. Never set more than 2 or 3 fruits in a year - they got huge, but were big watery, tasteless things. Kinda like eating a wet raw potato. I didn't shed a tear when fireblight killed it to the ground.

Gonebananas, excellent point about the aftertaste of the paw paw being concentrated in the skin and the greenish-tinged flesh right underneath it. You are absolutely correct on this. I just now this past year learned that paw paws can be dipped into boiling water and peeled like a tomato, making it much faster to process for the freezer than trying to peel with a paring knife, but the down side of this is that it does leave that greenish-tinged flesh behind. I froze mine this year with it on, but perhaps in the future should take it off. When I use them, I can always scrape it off of the semi-frozen fruits with a spoon or something before mashing and extracting the seeds. I'll be anxious to try the grafted, selected varieties myself. My bearing-aged trees are all seedlings. When I planted them back in the early 1990's, the availability of any paw paws was limited, and the grafted ones were really hard to come by, I guess, or at least, none of the nurseries I dealt with offered them. Frankly, I thought it was pretty progressive of me to obtain the seedling grown plants. I probably wouldn't have ever heard of them had not my sister moved to the city of Paw Paw, Michigan, back around that time, which piqued my curiosity. I finally got around to planting two selected varieties last spring, NC-17 and Sunflower, and I've got Mango and one other kind (can't recall, without looking up the order) coming in the spring. Yeah, Spring! Only 92 days to go until the Vernal Equinox (03/20/2009 at 11:47 am)! Can you tell that I'm ready?!

Yea, sigh, many of the dogs are grazers. One of them chewed my Sterling Silver rose so many times, she caused the bush to revert to a rugosa. Last year it bloomed with small red flowers! I had to fence off my asparagus because the dogs kept digging them up and eating them. They all love fruits and vegetables, and some of them eat flowers, too. I used to allow my hedgehogs some garden time, under supervision so they wouldn't get lost. They'd wander through the strawberry bed taking one bite out of each strawberry they came across. They never ate a whole strawberry. They lost their garden privileges. The long-earred hedgies have really expressive faces. The old black Lab in the photo loved to supervise the hedgehogs for me. This one is peeved about my intrusion with the camera. Lorna