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On Jan 28, 2007, at 10:56 PM, Del Stubbs wrote:

. . .It took me a whopping 10 minutes of googling to find the prof. and his email address. I

wrote him and asked how I pay for royalties, and of course I gave my impressions of the

apple and the cold testing I am doing here. I got back quite a letter . . . In the end he asked

if I would report back on my rootstock & cold testing of it in lieu of royalties. 

If you actually want to make the trees to do some testing, or if your experience would be of any value to the patent holder, this is an excellent strategy to try to get permission to graft a few trees.  They probably aren't set up to charge an individual for a handful of trees, but if they let you graft it for free, they might endanger their patent.  If they get something of value from you, however, such as test results, they are legally maintaining control of the material and don't have to figure out what to do with your check for $2.73.  I've never done this with patented plants, but I have been given access to valuable data (that wasn't quite valuable enough to set up a whole procedure to charge me for it) in exchange for "testing" (peer review) of aspects of it.

And if you like the material, sure, it never hurts to tell the developer that you like it and why.  Those guys do tons of work with very little recognition.

Ginda