Healing help

RD: I have a question regarding my Wolf River apple tree, hollow at trunk base for several years, yet still thriving. I want to draw large suckers to trunk, open my cambium layers, and bandage well, hoping these nutrient sources will steady up the old girl. What may happen is that several apple trees will hold up one – and perhaps, in years to come, one or other of the grafted suckers will become a new Wolf River? Our experts here have all retired, including their voices.
I have one other short note I am reminded of as I look at my left smallest finger. The first joint of this digit developed a hard, determined growth with a small crater in centre. Like the actor in My Big Fat Greek Wedding and his Windex bottle, I’ve been applying Vicks VapoRub to this spot and, presto! ... almost gone. My report is based on similar science that surrounds a registered-nurse aunt of mine who had a surgery date to have a wart beneath a fingernail surgically removed. She shared her predicament with her 80-year-old uncle, who asked that she try the Vicks first. He was a delivery driver for a Saint John business (horse and sloven), and he treated a wart on the horse nose as often as he walked past until it fell off (wart not nose!) ... so did her wart.
Got a lump you don’t like? Get out the blue bottle!
Thanks, and regards to DvL should he be along to mow the office grass.

Sandy McAllister
Cambridge Narrows, N.B.

Thanks for the note, Sandy. From what we’ve been able to glean concerning apple trees, yes, you’re surmising correctly. Old-timers would also burn out the hollow so as to heal it inside. In fact, bees often build hives in hollows, and there is some symbiosis happening there – the propolis and wax protect and heal the tree in which the bees find their shelter. Depending on how large the tree is, some prudent pruning may be necessary to keep the main trunk short and stable, so it’s less susceptible to breaking in the wind or collapsing in on itself from its own weight. As a safety measure, it would be wise to graft some scions of your Wolf River to some other healthy, vigorous apple stock as well. Hopefully, readers who have some relevant experience will chime in with additional and more detailed information.

Your tale about Vicks VapoRub struck home here. My grandfather was a strong proponent of the healing properties found in the contents of that little blue jar. When I was a kid, it was the remedy for most anything that ailed us. When he emigrated from Russia a few years before the Revolution, he joined the army in order to learn English, and served in the cavalry. (He was a teenager when he left what was then the Ukraine region within the Czarist Empire, after his father was murdered in a pogrom, during a period of rapidly increasing violence against and destruction of the region’s rural villages and the decimation of their populations – mostly political and ethnic, first by the Cossacks and White Russians at the turn of the 20th Century, and later, their near annihilation by the Nazis – a history in some ways sadly repeating now.)

I always thought his stories about using Vicks to heal his horse Joey’s problems were fabrications to make its use more palatable to us kids (I couldn’t and still can’t stand the smell), but it seems to have been a widespread equine as well as human remedy! MB