Description

Learning how to grow your own fruit trees is an essential life skill for gardeners. Even if you run out of room in your own patch (and there’s always room for one more…), selling home-grown fruit trees can be an easy source of income, and they make wonderful and personal gifts.

It all starts with growing your own root stock from seed or cutting, finding a “volunteer” tree that has come up by itself, or having a fruit tree in your garden that’s not pulling its weight. Any tree that’s not yielding a bountiful harvest of delicious and useful organic fruit every year either needs a strong talking to, replacing, or maybe … you could just graft it!

Turning non-productive trees into useful members of your garden community is one of the main reasons to learn how to grow your own trees and graft, but there are SO many more. Adding pollinisers to increase yield, creating multigraft or “fruit salad” trees and preserving heritage varieties are just some of them.

This course will simplify the complex world of the fruit tree nursery. You’ll understand how to grow your own tree from scratch, why fruit trees don’t grow “true to type”, and how to preserve heritage varieties by grafting. Plus you’ll have an excellent overview of grafting, know how (and when) to properly collect and store grafting wood, and will have your grafting plan in place.

And just think of all the money you’ll save on expensive nursery-bought fruit trees!

What’s included in this course: 

Module 1: Grow your own fruit trees (for free)

• Unit 1a: Grow your own fruit trees – spring jobs (article)
• Unit 1b: Grow your own fruit trees – spring jobs (audio)
• Unit 2 Fruit trees for free (article)
• Unit 3: Grow your own fruit trees from seed (article)
• Unit 4a: Rootstocks explained (article)
• Unit 4b: Rootstocks explained (audio)
• Unit 5: Grow your own peach trees from seed (article)
• Unit 6: Who owns fruit varieties? (article)
• Unit 7: Grow your own fruit trees annual calendar (resource)
• Unit 8: Grow your own fruit tree seedlings (article)

Module 2: Get confidence with grafting

• Unit 1a: Grafting your own fruit trees is easy and fun (article)
• Unit 1b: Plan your grafting this winter (activity)
• Unit 2: Learn from grafting success and failure (article)
• Unit 3: Calendar of grafting jobs (article)
• Unit 4: Nanna technology – storing grafting wood