Grafting

The long-awaited day finally arrived! We've been eagerly anticipating the arrival of 600 pieces of avocado budwood from a nursery in California since the beginning of January. On March 7^th at 7am, 2 coolers arrived safe and sound after nearly a week of transport from California to Alexandria, VA, to Addis Ababa, and finally here to Yetebon.

Since many of you probably don't know a lot about grafting, let me give you a brief explanation. Many fruit trees are grafted because planting a seed, such as an apple, will not guarantee you the same exact fruit surrounding that seed. In order to ensure that you get the same quality of fruit, and to speed up the process of getting a young tree to produce, we take a branch (known as budwood) from a mature tree and affix it onto a seedling tree of the same species (known as rootstock).

I have been looking forward to this time because it's one of the primary reasons I'm here. I trained several of the farm workers in grafting techniques and we practiced many afternoons to ensure that they could make straight cuts on the budwood, thus allowing a firm bond between budwood and rootstock.

It's a tedious process; to graft one tree takes nearly 10 minutes. Grafting 600 took some time! With anywhere from 2-4 people grafting at one time, we worked from sun-up to sundown for 3 days. Our time was limited because the budwood needed to be fresh to stay viable – and it had already been in transit for a week! After the first day, I was grafting in my sleep and woke up alert and eager to get going at 5am – without an alarm. It was a lot of fun, and I'm thrilled to report that we grafted 697 avocado trees in 4 days! After 2 weeks, many had sprouted; now, nearly a month later the majority has sprouted and only 5 have not made it.

Please pray for these young trees, that they would continue to grow strong and healthy to produce bountifully for this community!