CREATING a new apple variety for my little orchard has proved to be real hard graft. My New Year resolution as we came into 2020 was to take a walk along the Newport-Cowes cyclepath and ‘borrow’ some trackside prunings or scions from a tree that I had previously discovered produced apples of real sweet crispness. It was to be my first sojourn into the world of grafting I first witnessed some years ago at Deacon’s fruit nursery in Godshill, where, in skilled hands, it was the work of seconds to graft scions to create new trees on rootstock that would control the size of the tree.