Guerrilla Grafters is an organization that grafts fruit-bearing branches onto sterile fruit trees along the streets of San Francisco.
This is excellent. Now that it’s fall and the trees in my city are bearing, I’m always bummed out by the lack of free and open fruit trees, which very often fit the profile of the trees planted in city parks. The only difference is prettier springs and more fruitful falls (lit+fig). This particular experiment is made possible buy the sterile fruit trees planted as part of a city initiative, but the guerrilla planting of fruit trees is always possible, as well as finding older fruit trees and grafting new varietals on to create a healthier tree.
This is just glorious!
For anyone who doesn’t grow, grafting is a trick you can do with many plant species. Because plants have no immune system, you can cut a branch from one tree and attach it to another tree, and that branch will continue to grow. Bind the two plants at the join for long enough, and the two will grow together, giving you, basically, a Frankentree. Sometimes the plant tissues will even grow into each other, so you end up with single branches that have living tissue from both plants in them, like some kind of chimeratree.
They don’t even need to be the same species (though they do need to be compatible). A lot of plants you can buy from professional growers are actually grafted. It’s quite common to take a plant with a strong root system and graft the top half of another plant to it – this can let you grow plants in environments which wouldn’t normally support them. If you ever see chilli plants on sale, it’s quite common for them to be grafted. Look for the join, low down the stem, a few centimetres above the soil.
You can be audacious with this kind of thing, and grow fruit branches on trees that wouldn’t normally bear fruit, or you can even grow one tree with multiple types of fruit.
Guerilla grafting though. Heh! I like that!
HOTTTT BOTANY
.. oh you’re gonna put spikes out for the homeless? *plants fruit on all the trees in the city park* fuck u.
A previous tenant in a home I lived in once may have been something of an antithesis to this. They’d created a hybrid fruit tree in the back yard, which would grow at least three different types of fruit. It would grow these things that looked like mandarins, but pretty much tasted like really bad quality lemons… as well as growing mandarins. At first, I thought it was just that some of them were crappy mandarins that didn’t grow right… but then a friend of mine who knows more about plants tried one, and had a look at the tree, and she showed me where they had been very specifically grafted on. So, basically, I had a tree with a 50/50 chance of getting a good, tasty fruit, or a sour piece of sadness from hell.
