Grafting!

I'm currently reading The Grafter's Handbook, a very in-depth tome about grafting plants. I'm mainly interested because I don't have very much sunlight in my yard, so I'm limited in the number of fruit trees I can plant. I have this one tree that's a non-fruiting plum or pear or something, and it would be *ideal* rootstock to graft fruiting tree limbs onto. There are certain compatibility limits, but nurseries are selling what's called Fruit Salad trees, with sometimes as much as 5 different varieties of fruit on a single tree. So the next goal is to find out exactly what *kind* of tree it is, and see what I can add. If the answer is "nothing", then it's Happy Chainsaw Time!

I also finished The Botany of Desire and earlier work by Michael Pollan of the deservedly popular The Omnivore's Dilemma and In Defense of Food. Pollan's work has been largely responsible for my own personal transformation away from industrialized agriculture toward local food. ( Read more... )