Prices are usually around the same, in New Zealand, perhaps a little cheaper. Honestly, it seems like a fair price. We do get occasional sales of seasonal grafted fruit trees at the local low quality detritus for cheap mart, known as The Warehouse. Or end of season sales, at the same place, or at nurseries who are having a clear out. Other than that, your best bet is grafting or planting from seed. I have an expensive orchard of trees purchased at the going rate, and at sales, and I am still learning to graft and growing my own plants from seeds. The majority of my attempts to germinate plants from seed or cuttings have succeeded. I currently have seedlings of apricot, avocado, persimmon, tamarind and various citrus.
Konstantinos has a great
project thread with lots of pictures, where he goes about Greece planting seeds, and then revisiting to show the results.
I suggest finding a local place that sells rootstock cuttings. Buy 100 or so when the correct time of year arises (winter), and put them in coarse sand to grow
roots. When they have roots, plant them out and then buy or acquire in some way a whole lot of cuttings and graft them. Personally, I would buy dwarfing rootstock and grow them in a cordon, with each tree closely spaced in a row angled on the side to promote fruit bearing. The ones you like the most can have cuttings taken again from them at a later point, and can be grafted out to larger rootstock in the places you have decided on for them in the meantime.
In the meantime, when you eat an
apple or pear or persimmon you like, immediately take the seeds and put them in a sealed ziplock bag with moist but not wet potting mix in the fridge. Leave it in the fridge over winter, and they
should germinate send out roots in the bag. I had a 100% success rate. Tamarind seeds, you can just nick them to get past the hard dark seed coat and plant them. Stone fruit can be cracked, and the kernel extracted, and that can be planted immediately.
