I have numerous grafting projects I’d like to do. I might be able to do mostly grafting with it’s own youtube channel and stay pretty busy. Not that I want to. But I do have a lot of ideas I want to try out.
LARGE SCALE GRAFTING PROJECTS
Okay, I reeealllly want to do this large scale grafted structure project! I’ve had this idea for years to do large scale grafted structures and projects. Not just for living sculptures, but for architectural elements. Imagine if I could graft in one piece for instance, a spiral staircase, or a large gate structure or gazebo, etc. I know some of the species I want to use and I have some idea of how to pull it off. It is not as simple as just grafting stuff together and letting it grow. Attention has to be paid to giving various areas a reason to grow and increase in diameter, or not as the case may be.
The possibilities are endless here. I know there are already people growing grafted one piece chairs and other items. My main interest though is scaling things up to a very large scale. I’d prefer to make it a project that is transparent and followable. Probably the best way to make it economically viable would be grow stuff that is documented in video content, and then auction it off after people have been following the project and watching the creative and practical processes, tribulations and successes as it grows. My interest is, as usual, primarily pioneering methods, testing species, and just figuring it all out so other people can do it too. It would make great content for videos and blogging and it would probably be easy to invest people in the whole journey.
There is not much more to say, but there is plenty to do. It is a seriously big, involved project. What is needed is long term access to sizable flat land, water, labor and money for materials. I could see filling up a pretty large area with large scale experiments, some of which could get big enough to require a wide load trailer to haul away. Plants would have to grow very uniformly, which may require some soil improvement depending on the native soil quality. Opaque ground coverings such as heavy duty weed cloth would also probably be necessary for uniform, fast growth via reduced competition and weed control. Automated drip irrigation would be even more essential for that uniform, fast growth. There are incredibly fast growing species out there. Early efforts would largely revolve around acquiring plants and cuttings and growing those out in test plots for assessment of growth uniformity, vigor and graftability. I can’t do all this myself, not even close, so a general garden and orchard manager would be essential as well. And possibly some other labor.
Best idea ever.
SMALL SCALE GRAFTING PROJECTS
Aside from a growing large scale grafted structures, I’m also very interested in pushing boundaries and experimenting with small scale grafting. These inquiries, in a general sense, would involve a lot of pushing of boundaries, like grafting larger material, grafting fruiting wood instead of new scion wood, very long scions and stuff like that. Some of these have obvious practical applications, others are just to find the boundaries of what is possible, in case that information is useful at any point. I once grafted 6 apple scions one on top of the other on one new rootstock, just to see if it would grow. Every graft took and the tree grew. I have way more radical experiments than that in mind. We are operating in a paradigm of very limiting assumptions in grafting. It’s time to find out what those boundaries really are.
Other grafting pursuits and tests would be more for creative purposes, like art and eventually harvesting trees with special characteristics for wood working. It might seem easy enough to whip out some grafts along these lines, but everything takes time, headspace for planning and energy. Also a place I can observe the grafts long enough to learn what we can from them. Which comes back, as most projects do, to Health, Help, Money and Land.
There are quite a lot of things to try actually and some are very weird. Many will likely fail and yield boundary information only, like, well I guess we can’t get away with that! I would also very much like to follow this project, like many others, in a sort of blow by blow video and blog documentation. There are several reasons to do that. One is that the creative and problem solving process is of great value to inspire people to think outside the box and be good problem solvers. In my eyes, a lot of the value of my content is along those lines. You know, the teach a man to fish sort or thing. The other is to document that they are my own ideas that I’m developing. Documentation also helps me build credibility, at least if enough of them work out lol. I’m willing to take that chance :)