Learn how to graft new plants for your garden, including new fruit trees for the coming spring.

Participants will get hands-on practice with side veneer grafting, will also learn the basics of cleft and whip-and-tongue grafting, and can take home the plants they create.

Start new fruit trees, more for spring

Simply put, grafting lets you combine the best parts of two plants into one. For example, you could cut a stem from an apple tree that has especially tasty fruit, graft it onto the rootstock of a cold-hardy apple variety, and produce a new apple tree blessed with both of those features.

The workshop will provide the plant materials for grafting. The lower grafted parts — called the rootstocks or understocks — will be from apple, white pine, ginkgo, Norway spruce and balsam fir. The upper parts, or scions, haven’t been chosen yet.

Participants also can bring their own scions.

Save $10 as Secrest friend

The cost is $35 for members of the Friends of Secrest Arboretum and $45 for nonmembers. Details and online registration are available. Call 330-263-3761 for more information.

Meet at the arboretum’s field headquarters building at 2320 Selby Road on the OARDC campus.