Tomorrow, April 15, I’ll be out in the orchard grafting three apple varieties that I’m especially excited to add to the homestead: Pink Lemonade, Cherub, and Cherry Crush.

One of the things I love about grafting is that it lets you add years of possibility to a tree in a single afternoon. Instead of starting from scratch, you can take wood from a variety that has already proven interesting and give it a place to grow in your own orchard. It feels a little like borrowing time.

The Pink Lemonade scion comes from SkillCult’s breeding work. It was formerly known as Flaxen and is a cross between Grenadine and Gold Rush. What caught my attention is the combination of sweetness, acidity, and pink flesh, along with the occasional citrus note that gave it its new name. It sounds like the kind of apple that could bring something lively and unusual to the orchard.

I’ll also be grafting Cherub, which is a Wickson Crab x Rubaiyat cross. It is described as a small pink-fleshed apple with a sweet, low-acid profile and some unusual berry, floral, and caramel notes. It sounds like one of those apples that may not fit the standard grocery-store mold, but could be genuinely memorable in a home orchard.

The third variety is Cherry Crush, a cross between Grenadine and Cherry Cox. The part that really stands out is its reported cherry note, along with a good sugar-acid balance and light pink flesh. That kind of distinctive flavor is hard not to want to trial for ourselves.

Part of the joy of an orchard is that it doesn’t all have to be practical in the narrowest sense. Some trees are planted for storage, some for reliability, some for disease resistance, and some simply because they are interesting. These three lean toward the interesting side, which is reason enough for me.

If the grafts take, this will be the beginning of a longer experiment. We’ll get to watch how they grow here, how they handle our conditions, and whether their fruit lives up to the promise that made them worth grafting in the first place.

That is part of the pleasure of orchard life. You make a cut, wrap a graft, and then wait with hope.