This summer when you fork over $3 a pound for organic plums, pears and other juicy tree-fruit, keep in mind that the city of Seattle is home to thousands of trees that could be bearing fruit but aren't.
With a sharp splicing knife and a touch of Old World wisdom, this doesn't have to be true.
"We have been trained to work and buy things," says Jenny Pell, a permanent-agriculture consultant and founder of the Wilder Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to disseminating permaculture principles around the world.
"People have lost the concept of harvesting their food. Everything has to be controlled."
Just for a moment, imagine a city where those blossoming trees that we admire in the spring actually offered us food in the summer. Your neighborhood would be filled with myriad fruit trees, and when their crop ripened, you'd invite friends over for a picking party. There's no way that you could eat all of your tree's fruit, and it felt good to share. During the summer, you'd grocery-shop less, spend more time outside and enjoy more time with your neighbors.
This isn't a dream - it's the colorful and tasty world according to Pell. And this summer, Pell's world comes one step closer to becoming a reality.
On Sunday, June 5, Pell begins an ongoing Urban Permaculture series with a workshop on tree grafting. She will offer monthly workshops in the Queen Anne, Magnolia and Greenlake neighborhoods on permaculture design.
Permaculture, or permanent agriculture, is an environmental discipline and science practiced all over the world. It is based on three principles: care for the earth, care for people and the distribution and sharing of surplus. Its underlying theme is finding biological harmony and balance with your environment.
"I want to reintroduce sustainable skills into the neighborhoods," exclaims Pell. "I want to increase local abundance and help people harvest food in their own back yards - in their alleys."
Tree grafting, a popular method of plant propagation, is great place to begin. It is an ancient skill whereby the cambium tissues from the branch or rootstock (with a desirable yield) touch the cambium tissues of a growing tree. The two attach and eventually grow together. Many trees in our own backyards and alleys could be grafted with edible-fruit rootstocks and produce fruit within a few years.
"Grafting is an incredible way to increase the abundance in your neighborhoods using trees that don't need to be watered and need very little maintenance," says Pell.
During the grafting workshop, Pell and Douglas Bullock, a grafting expert and permaculture guru, will teach the biology behind grafting and strategies for success. Participants will have the opportunity to graft trees in their own backyards.
"Most people have no idea that every apple that they have ever eaten comes from a grafted tree," states Pell.
"For a lot of people," she adds, "grating is a complete mystery."
Many fruits and nuts are hetero-zygous, which means that they do not grow true to seed. If you ate a delicious apple and planted the seeds, odds are you could not reproduce your delicious apple.
The apples that we know and love today came into existence because people planted thousands of apple seeds, and a handful of the grown trees yielded tasty fruit. Those few trees were then grafted onto other apple trees with less appealing fruit.
It is also possible to graft different fruit onto one tree. For example, you could grow peaches, plums and pears on the same tree.
In grafting, you are taking the genetics that you like from one tree and growing them on a different tree. You are not splicing genes or crossing species, and there is no genetic modification going on.
"We have been genetically selecting for thousands of years," explains Pell. "It is a completely different story from genetically engineering, which is going in, breaching the cell wall and inserting, via a virus vector, recombinant DNA from a different species."
Recombinant DNA and virus vectors are just a few more good reasons to look to your backyard and your neighborhood as places to grow food.
"I have this tiny little backyard, and I can only plant so many things in it," notes Pell.
"I can't put in six plum trees and four apple trees. But I have been touring the alleys around my yard, and there are all of these hawthorn trees, which are in the apple family. I can graft apple stocks onto them."
Pell regularly walks around her neighborhood and takes note of what is growing around her. She wants to create a community where people produce food in their own backyards and share with one another.
"I think that there is a fallacy that you have to give things up in order to live sustainably," says Pell, who believes that if you are truly living sustainably, you have more: more time, more food, more family connections and community.
"You have more of all the things that are fulfilling," she concludes.
For more information on how to bring fresh fruits and abundance into your neighborhood, contact Jenny Pell at 949-0496, jennyeverywhere@yahoo.com or www.permaculturenow.com
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