Learn to graft fruit trees

Group teaches skills to boost homegrown food production

By Randy White for Sustainable Life

The Portland Tribune, Jan 14, 2010

JONATHAN HOUSE / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP PHOTO

Padraig Ruarc MacRuaidhri displays a tree cutting during filming of a Bright Neighbor training video on how to graft tree branches.

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With a constant stream of dire news about global warming, it can be paralyzing to think we may be headed for major tragedy.

To survive, we can’t just sit at our computers and simply blog global warming out of existence. We are going to have to get dirt under our fingernails.

This winter, Bright Neighbor invites Portlanders from all 95 neighborhoods to take part in a cooperative experiment — in tree-grafting — meant to help our city get into a new global-warming groove. If hundreds of Portlanders can dress up as zombies and dance to a perfectly choreographed version of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” surely we can direct some of that creative energy to fixing the planet’s lungs.

The idea is to graft living tree branches to matching root stock, creating new food trees from existing ones. We can time-warp new carbon-sequestering food trees into existence much faster through grafting.

It would be inspiring and cool if we Portlanders would come together to help combat global warming and increase local food supplies through a cooperative tree-grafting exercise. We would smoke Seattle and San Francisco in the ‘team effort’ category.

It’s going to take community cooperation to sustain ourselves as a community in the long term. Why should we wait for all the polar bears to drown before we get serious?

Bright Neighbor is a Portland community system for people seeking to achieve self-sufficiency and independence from fossil-fuel based living. In addition to connecting people together around common location and interests, our local social network offers a unique set of tools and activities to help build community resilience through resource-sharing and cooperation.

What makes Bright Neighbor different from Facebook and Craigslist is the focus on helping coordinate real-world sustainability at the hyper-local level.

More and more people are realizing it will take cooperation, teamwork and accountability to nonviolently navigate the transition away from fossil fuels. If we were a more disciplined and sharing society, we could sustain ourselves through the hard times now and the harder times ahead.

Many homeowners with trees don’t know how to properly maintain them for maximum fruit production. We can sequester carbon as a community and add more food to our local supply through the creation of new fruit and nut trees.

There will be mistakes, of course. Not all the new trees we create will survive.

While you could just buy a tree and plant it, this project is meant to be a living activity that teaches people global warming combat skills valuable now and in the future.

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