Bounty of the woods, and Grafting idea Frugal

I have foraged a whole bunch of yummy wild Pawpaws and have kept a lot of the seeds.

They have been cleaned, soaked briefly in a 10% bleach wash, now sitting happily moist and striating in my refrigerator for the next 3-4 months. Some have been sold which is nice - money in my pocket is always nice.

What I'd like to do is see if I can get some grafts going, and then barter so I can get scions of good named Pawpaw varieties and graft them on the wild rootstock.

My idea is to barter started (wild) trees for as many scions as I can beg from different varieties and different people.

We'd all win - the landowner with trees would get vigorous young rootstock to experiment with (or wild Pawpaws to see what happens)

I'd get named fruit scions to experiment with.

Ideally we'd all walk away with free trees.

The idea initially came from someone planting apple seeds from store bought fruit, and they were planning to do the same with apples. (Because apples are weird, you never really know what kind of apple you'll get from seed and if it's even going to be any kind of tasty)

Not only would this work with Pawpaws and apples, it'd also work with Cherries.

Folks have to trim their fruit trees anyway, why not make more trees from what would just end up as yard waste?

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Translation for non-gardeners;

Plant seeds you dig out of food, that'll be the roots and bottom of the tree. Let it grow. When it's big enough, get trimmings from trees that are known to be tasty - cut the top of the food-seed-tree off and graft in the trimming from the yummy-fruit-tree-trimming. Grafting intro here

You can also make a fruit salad tree by grafting, but you have to stick the right species with the right species. Just replace branches, not the whole top.

Still, if you only have room for one apple tree as an example, you can still have different kinds of apples.

This fella went kinda bonkers, and has 40 different varieties of fruit on his tree. It's also beautiful.

Thoughts?

Submitted September 26, 2015 at 12:58PM by use_more_lube http://ift.tt/1KEZwTT Frugal