My Fruit Trees

grafted citrus

I currently have apple, lemon, grapefruit and mango trees growing, all of which I started from seed! Most of these are only a month or two old, the apple tree however turned 5 last month (5 years). Last year, or perhaps it was two years ago I saw this video on YouTube, it's the first of a BBC series called The A to Z of TV Gardening. The idea of the show is they take each letter of the alphabet and week by week talk about different plants that begin with that letter. Well an obvious topic for the letter A is of course apples, now the piece that impressed me most shows up at about 7 minutes 40seconds and introduces us to a man who has an apple tree which through grafting produces over 250 different varieties of apple. Now for those of you who don't know what grafting is, basically you take a branch of one tree and bind it to another and if done properly the two will grow together. This is actually to some extent how most apples are grown because apple seeds aren't true to the parent tree. Well this has got me thinking, you can graft any tree together with another as long as they are from the same family. Last week when we went to our local greenhouse I noticed that they have Lime trees for sale and I have been dying to get a lime tree for some time now, then the thought occurred to me that you easily graft citrus trees together, allowing you to have lemons, limes, oranges and grapefruits all growing on the same tree... now isn't that just a lovely idea!