@HaddenTurner 1/2 Those noble qualities you refer to? They can travel. Our volunteers are now decades into tracking the relative performance of ca. 8K fruit varieties across the PNW; identifying those that have settled best as our most promising ‘future heirlooms'; and freely sharing them.
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Sure, we're pan-bioregional but we didn't begin that way. Within a few years our local scion exchange had blown up into the largest organics-focused propagation fair in the country. So, we deliberately *disorganized* to wherever we found locally-grounded, community support. Quote tweet: 3/ We didn’t begin as orchardists. An emergent property of the Eugene Permaculture Guild spring seed swap 25 years ago, we grew into the country’s largest, organics-focused propagation fair; then very deliberately dis-organized into small, distributed, community-based efforts. [Image of small, intimate, fruit-tasting event] The model, useful, I suppose, because it proves how intensely local, highly diverse, community-supported collaboration serves everyone and the larger biotic cause of diversity, best. A friend to all and an enemy of none, our motto. Do the good work and you meet the good people. And yes, we derive our strength from the power of the local, the personal relationships, co-intelligence and skillsets allowing us access to a spellbinding array of cultivars we've together identified as cornerstone 'future heirlooms'. It's simply not possible to buy what we do. –
Open original documentAfter six frenetic weekends of fairs grafting hundreds of varieties of fruit trees for hundreds of folk, the @agrariansharing team finally gets to look up. Now, I'm grafting for a major apple diversity project in Lorane, OR, and the emergent 'homestead church network' hereabouts.
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Photograph of hands Z-grafting an apple tree into being.