The reasons to try your hand at grafting are many and varied. As well as increasing the varieties of fruit you’ll be harvesting each year, you’ll be improving pollination, extending your fruiting season and creating important diversity to benefit your patch.
In simple terms, grafting is the art of taking cuttings from one tree and attaching it to another. If this sounds easy it’s because it actually is! So if you’ve ever pondered grafting a few new varieties of apples or plums onto an existing fruit tree, or enjoyed a variety of peach or pear from a friend’s harvest and wished you could have a tree just like it, then grafting is definitely worth a shot.
With the plethora of grafting techniques out there, it’s easy to become overwhelmed with what type of graft you should use. One of the simplest and most versatile grafts is a basic bark graft. A way to either completely change over a young tree of around four or five years or to add a few different varieties to an older tree by grafting into existing branches, bark grafting is a handy technique to know.
And you’ll become completely hooked on just how many varieties you can graft onto a single tree.