Public School Food Forest

Grant: First off, thanks for all that you've helped us do already!

I'm a middle school biology teacher and work at a school with 100s of acres and for admin that are willing to plant stuff (albeit in the "right" locations). We've planted about 30 trees that you sold us last April. We've also planted about 15 fruiting/support species plus 20-30 herbs, bulbs, and fruiting vines. This was all after my students dig two swales on contour and made a simple hugel bed downhill of the swale.

We are in the process of writing a grant and I've got a lot of stuff planned if we get the grant including a greenhouse, Aquaponics lab, hydroponics towers and (especially) lots of more diversity to plant in the Food Forest.

My question for you is how do to best have my kids learn to graft and how to grow our own rootstock?

We've been saving apple seeds from the lunchroom and hoping to get some to grow and possibly graft on top of them if they work out. Besides that, I'm not sure what else to do. We'll have a greenhouse, unlimited rough compost and plenty of 7th grade hands to help grow our food Forest in and around the school's ponds and river.

How to best grow rootstock:

Well, the simplest way would be from seeds, but you'll end up with fullsize trees of highly variable stock. What we prefer, and what all professional nurseries do is "stooling" rootstock for clonal propagation

It works like this:



Grafting:

The fear police in a school setting would likely run rampant if you taught whip-and-tongue with a knife, so I recommend use of a grafting tool.

The Topgrafter
we sell is the best overall and makes great deep-vee grafts. There is a $20 chinese grafter you can get on Amazon. It's "good enough" for the 1/4"-3/8" range, but not as good as the Topgrafter

or, just T-bud in the summer

so lucky you are to have school board with the fore site Zach to allow such rebellious behavior under their purview. We have encounter huge push back from ours in the thoroughly greenwashed state and town of Fort Collins Colorado. They insist that when we raise money and volunteers to put gardens at schools that we spend 8k of 10k on a pre-approved fence. They even completely quashed a solar battery greenhouse that was ready to go money management volunteers and all last minute. Kids got nothing appreciable. Good luck Zach and thanks Grant for your ethic of sharing.