Skip to content
Sep 21, 2026 · Grapes & Vinesplanting valiant grapes at the assiniboine food forest orchard, a local non profit in Brandon MB who has this community orchard and nature trails for the public to enjoy. We donated some grapes and a few wild plums and sandcherries grown from locally source seeds and cuttings, and a group of volunteers helped to plant this weekend. The perimeter fence is now completely lined with Valiant grapes and has some new trellis wire to support them, the older grapes are three growing seasons in and one reached the top. eventually the deer fence will be covered with grapes, and this cold hardy variety does well here in zone 3 southern MB without any winter protection. I leant my fencing expertise to help with the high tensile wires that were strung to give the grapes a space to grow and support inside the page wire, because curious deer are always trying to graze the leaves and we want to try and keep most of the vines and fruit out of reach. We also brought hardware cloth to help protect the small fruit trees from voles (which are controlled by mowing but still show up), and a butternut tree to round out a north corner.Read field note →+3
Sep 21, 2026 · Grafting WorkH. sinsensis, a very late ripening and large sea buckthorn species. i have a graft here that's pollinated by a smaller shelterbelt type, and it fruits heavily every year but they aren't ripe until October. sometimes there's snow on the ground when I pick them, a real contrast to the more common ones I find in our area that ripen in july and august. photos taken sept 20 and the fruit are just starting to change color, they'll be bright orange next month.Read field note →+2
Sep 21, 2026 · Apples & Crabapplessiberian crabapple, usually a small late hanging apple. I have a few trees planted twenty years ago that all have slightly different fruit sizes and colors, apple is a mixed bag of genetics but these ones are mostly Malus bacatta the siberian crabapple, and they've survived plenty of -40C winters so I like to use this seed source for our apple rootstocks.Read field note →+3
Sep 21, 2026 · Wildlife & Habitata few larger fruiting hawthorns from a lakeside park location, I mixed these in with other hawthorns collected this fall. the thorns are the same size and shape as the other bushes I've come across, and this tree is in a wet area with heavy soil so maybe that explains the fruit, and how none of the leaves have dropped, or maybe it's genetic. hawthorns a super high in pectin, if you blend them up and strain for a jelly even when mixed with water it sets up like hawthorn jello. I like hawthorns because they're a tough native fruit tree, the 2-3 inch long thorns are visually interesting, and they provide some safe habit for small wildlifeRead field note →+4
Sep 21, 2026 · Apples & Crabapplesa healed girdle from voles this spring. the cambium had just enough of a layer left to regenerate and bridge the span, a thin strip of intact bark kept the tree alive as well. this is about red wonder tree planted at a local orchard, and I was happy to see it pull through without needing to be regrafted. this winter this tree row has hardware cloth protection from small rodents who live under the snow and love to eat the tasty apple bark on young trees.Read field note →+3
Sep 21, 2026 · Berries & Currantshawthorns loaded with ripe fruit in late september, I've collected these from a few stands and mix the lots together to grow, I haven't been able to find a good set of keys to discriminate our local hawthorn species and their hybrid so I'm just going with 'hawthorn' to describe them. some bushes have slightly larger fruit and ripen earlier, and one bush nearby get grazed by the deer more than the rest because it has fewer thorns, so there is some variation. the thorns are impressive. I've collected scions from this exact tree and grafted them onto saskatoon, and they fruit this year - one peculiar thing about the grafts is that the thorns often get secondary barbs.Read field note →+3
Sep 21, 2026 · Seeds & Stratificationwild bergmot flowers are done and the dry heads are ready to pick for next year's seed. I left most of them in this patch to encourage more self seeding, though they are perennial.Read field note →+2
Sep 21, 2026 · Pears & Rootstock Trialslast of the ussurian pears have dropped, well mostly I heard a few hit the ground while I was collecting this crate. I was here earlier this month and most of the pears I passed over are gone now, suspect the local deer are finding them. this hefty create will reduce to just a big handful of pear seeds, and I'll plant them back into ironically the same type of crate to grow. these old bulb crates are so useful.Read field note →
Sep 21, 2026 · Seeds & Stratificationhackberries are perfectly ripe in late september, collected a handful to snack on from a low branch on this very tall tree. it's sort of an edible, the thin coating over the seeds is sweet and tasty.Read field note →+1
Sep 17, 2026 · Apples & Crabapplessweet konrad is a new apple introduced by famous orchardist and breeder Konrad Ilg in Edmonton AB, we grafted a few trees this spring and have them in our fall sale. the photos are from mid september, the apple is described as low acid with good flavour, large open pollinated cross with possibly chestnut in the parentage.Read field note →+2
Sep 17, 2026 · Berries & Currantshey our fall sale is on. taking orders and shipping until oct 15th for trees and plants to customers in Canada. basically oct 20 is the start of winter in Manitoba and we pack up the nursery in early November. So this fall I have for the first time a new set of currants and gooseberries where we might be the only nursery in the county growing, and also a whole set of wildflower plugs.. there's a good sized list, as a craft scale nursery run enthusiastically by me (Doug McGregor) there is rare and unusual variety because that's interesting and exciting to me, but for any one thing there's a small batch. I might grow one tray of a cultivar or species, but then try and explore more of the variation in that group. nearly everything is zone 3 cold hardy. there are some fun new additions like small sets of russian pears that are hard to find, and own rooted plums that's a rabbit hole I've gone down through experimentation. there's collections of native plants that I would like to see grown more widely like our native Canada Plum - the best pollinator for other plums, and Ribes Glandulosum - Skunk Currant - with it's sprawling shape and spikey red fruit. We also have seeds available for many of the plants we grow, it's the same seeds we use if you want to try out growing these in the spring, many perennials need some cold conditioning time so fall and winter is the right time to get the seeds. And fall is a good time to plant trees, you get the roots in the ground well insulated ahead of winter and they can take off in the spring.Read field note →+2
Sep 13, 2026 · Plum & Cherry Hybridscollected the last of the wild plums yesterday, this selection (americana #2) ripens about 10 days later than most other wild plums, which is good to spread the season out - they were a solid bright green when the others were starting to drop. this is the first year I've had a crop on these grafts, the last photo shows the union where it's been top worked onto chokecherry. does wild plum graft well onto chokecherry? the answer is probably, though it seems to be about 75% for me, some grafts will fail in the first year. some in the second year can have subtle chlorosis, a yellow tinge to the leaves which is a sign of stress, but most of the time they're perfectly healthy like this one. I find it actually does even better as an interstem. can you just plant wild plums, well yes and long term that's going to work out better I expect, but in this case it was a large choke cherry bush in the yard and I was able to graft over one part of it, if they didn't work out the chokecherry will just rebound from the undergrowth and fill the space back in. it's faster, with a pollinator you're producing plums after one or two years. also in a landscape with dense mature shrubs, planting a seedling right in the mix would suffer for light and be low enough that deer and rabbits can eat it, where grafting at shoulder height solves both of those. so three advantages, plus you get to say your plums grow on a chokecherry tree.Read field note →+2
- Choosing a selection results in a full page refresh.
- Opens in a new window.
