Research: Benefits of Growing your Own Food

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I. Identify the information need, describe background information, so what who cares, ~ 1 paragraph

Growing your own food is a highly rewarding and economical experience. There is nothing like the feeling of watching the seeds that you sowed sprout through the soil and begin to grow tall. After months of care, your garden is filled with vining beanstalks, tall shoots of brussels sprouts, and the tops of carrots letting you know of the treasures that lie under the earth. As you learn to grow different varieties of fruits and vegetables, the more you want to learn. The food you grow is delicious, and instead of running to the store to buy the onion you forgot you needed, you can just open your back door and pull one from the ground, saving you hundreds of dollars by the end of the year. After supplementing my own grocery list with the food that I’ve grown, I can’t help but want to find even more to grow. When I visited the Propagation Fair at LCC and saw the hundreds, if not thousands, of twigs used for grafting trees, I became highly interested in growing trees. I knew that grafting was a significant part of that, and having always wanted to grow my own apples, I decided that I wanted to learn more about what the process was to graft apple trees.

II. State the research question and give a nutshell answer

I had heard of grafting in conversations with other gardeners, and in passing throughout the various botany classes that I have taken, but I didn’t know much more than the basics. After deciding that I wanted to grow my own fruit trees, I wanted to learn more about what tree grafting is, why it is used, particularly for apples, and some techniques on how it is done. As it turns out, grafting is a process in which a branch o...

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...f fruit you want, so long as the conditions are right. You can even grow more than one kind of fruit on a tree by grafting more than one scion to different branches on the rootstock. Supplementing your diet with food that you have grown yourself is extremely rewarding and should not be overlooked as a viable option.

I. Conclusion, re-emphasize nutshell answer
Grafting is an ingenious technique discovered thousands of years ago that allows two or more plants to be joined together. The scion is chosen based on what cultivar you are interested in growing, whether it be a particular kind of leaf, or a type of flower, or a specific variety of fruit, such as the apple, which can only be replicated through grafting. Each method of grafting is suitable for different kinds of conditions, but the easiest Cleft Graft only requires a few simple supplies and a little care.

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