Guerrilla Fruit Tree Grafting from Fanny Rose on Vimeo.

Grafting, in this case specifically fruit tree grafting, is a method of fruit tree propagation where the fruit of one tree is encouraged to grow on the tissue of another tree.

I first learned of grafting from reading Michael Pollan's book The Botany of Desire. Apple trees are like humans in that the seeds of apples can create an apple of entirely different genetics (taste, color, size...etc) than the parent apple. Before grafting, apples were mostly used for cider due to the fact that they many were extremely bitter and they all had different tastes. Grafting was a way to copy the genetics of a particularly sweet apple - like a red delicious for instance - the ones that people want to eat.

Starting trees from seeds is hard and often not the best way to propagate fruit trees. It takes a very long time. With grafts, you can often have fruit for the next season.

All the fruit trees we used for this experiment can be found overhanging in Santa Monica alleys between Wilshire and Washington and 26th and Yale.

I call this guerrilla fruit tree grafting because technically Austin and I were taking cuttings from people's private fruit trees in order to copy those genetics and have fruit of our own. I don't know the legality of this, but in any case it is not the most "legitimate" way one can go about fruit tree grafting.  I've written more about guerrilla gardening here in Greenlight.