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["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

While home tissue culture is possible, there are plenty of older low tech methods that still work fine.  I knew an apple variety collector who kept a stool bed and propagated his own rootstocks for many years.  A space of a few square feet gave him a couple dozen new rootstocks to use every year.  Go farther back and layering was used for centuries to propagate apples and other fruits.  If you aren't in a hurry, layer a tree to get on it's own roots, let it grow a couple of years, then use root cuttings to start new trees.  The shoots from the roots go through a juvenile phase like a seedling.  In the juvenile phase, many perennials will root from stem cuttings when they wouldn't root as cuttings from an adult tree.  The late Sherwood Akin used a variation of that method to grow plants on their own roots that were hard to propagate other ways.

There are plenty of low-tech methods that still work and will produce more than sufficient quantities of plants for a lot of uses.

-Lon Rombough
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On Nov 15, 2008, at 8:33 PM, Douglas Woodard wrote:

I have a notion that some generations hence the household will recover 
some of its old economic importance, many if not most of us will live 
more spread out on the land, and something like NAFEX if not the 
organization itself will be of major importance.

In the nearer future, a troubled exchange economy may see NAFEX's 
numbers recover. I can see the availability of rootstocks, both modern 
clonal stocks and good seed or seedlings, being somewhat of a 
bottleneck. Those who help to solve this problem will make a major 
contribution. I can see home tissue culture and the transmission of the 
knowledge of how to do it, being a major skill added to grsfting and 
budding.

Doug Woodard
St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada