For a good twenty years I have been dabbling in various ways to support our local food security and make good use of local fruit trees and other plants we can eat from. Long before I founded The Urban Orchardist I used to organize the Guelph Fruit Tree Project, where we would mobilize volunteers to pick from unused fruit trees in people's yards and donate the harvest to shelters and food banks. I have led many edible & medicinal wild plant walks to equip people with foraging skills and ethics, I taught on similar topics at the Guelph Outdoor School, and I have helped found or maintain community gardens.
I began The Urban Orchardist in 2021 with a vision to turn my home city of Guelph into a giant food forest - that is, a place full of all sorts of healthy edible landscapes, with a special attention to fruit trees. Since then, the work itself of running a business and taking on jobs has kept me so busy that I have not dedicated enough time towards that vision of transforming our city and how we relate to it (this latter part is crucial, because it can only work to plant fruit (and nut) trees everywhere if there is the social and cultural interest and capacity to do something with said harvests).
One idea I've had to work towards this is to identify apples and pears that produce poor-quality fruit and graft high-quality varieties onto them, with a focus on trees that are available to the public, either in front or side yards, in alleyways, community gardens, etc.
There is a grafting method called topworking which involves sawing down an established tree and grafting scions into the bark - I describe it here: Topworking - a grafting method using mature trees as rootstock.
My question to readers who live in Guelph is, do you have a tree in your life that could be a candidate for this? Do you have a poor-quality apple or pear tree (perhaps a wild/feral seedling that popped up, or an ornamental pear that makes pea-sized fruit, or a variety that always gets a disease) that is located where the public/passersby could access it, that I can graft over to a better variety?
If so, please email me at matt@theurbanorchardist.com.