Guerrilla Grafting
I love a little harmless rebellion, so I enjoyed reading about the guerrilla grafting that is taking place in San Francisco.
San Francisco won’t allow fruiting trees because they don’t want to deal with mess of rotting fruit and pests, so they planted non-fruiting fruit trees all over the city. Now a group of people are grafting branches to the trees, changing non-fruiting trees into fruiting ones to provide free food for city inhabitants.
Grafting is a common gardening technique. Here’s how the article describes it:
First a slit is made in the host tree. Then the alien branch is whittled into a pointed wedge. The grafter inserts the wedge and matches up the elements’ nutrient-transporting layers before securing the area with tape. The Guerrilla Grafters use electrical tape instead of grafting tape so they can color code their work for future reference.
“Once it heals, it connects,” Hui said. “Basically the branch becomes part of the tree.”
For more, check out How tree grafting is done.
This project is intended to be especially useful in neighborhoods where people have to go out of their way to get fresh produce. One person in the article called it the “gardener’s version of graffiti.” [Inhabitat]
