Interesting Topic, Grafting and Budding

I met a guy that comes to where I work, all the time, and went to his house to do some stonework and learn something very interesting. Grafting and budding are basically the manipulation of one tree to make it a better tree. No, to make it more like a tree that you want. To keep it easy and short, you can cut a branch off of one species of tree and fuse it to another tree of the same species. For example, apples to apples, literally. As far as I know the variety does not matter, because the gentleman that I was working for has an apple tree with 102 different varieties, or tastes, as he called it, on one tree. Pretty amazing. He also showed me a lemon that was the size of a basketball that came from one of his fabricated trees in Florida. It blew my mind, and has me interested in a new hobby.

I will be back to this post to elaborate in the near future, time is short for now. Bless those effected by Ike and its aftermath.

Recently Re-Inspired/ A Personal, Written Thought.

On Monday evening as I was driving down to visit my mom, on the stretch of I-71, I had another one of my great ideas.

Truthfully, I was sort of losing faith in GreenifyNow. It has been up and running for about a month and a half. From my count, there have been about 1200 visitors, which isn't bad, but it isn't great either. The thing that hurts is, out of all my 1900 MySpace friends only about a quarter of the visits came through there. I was kinda counting on MySpace for helping establish a foothold for GreenifyNow, but there have only been two donations from there, despite about half of my friends asking me what they can do to help. Enough of that, to the good stuff.

The stretch of I-71 between Columbus and Cincinnati consists of about 100 miles of farmland and woods, on both sides of the road. I have always looked at it as the most boring drive that a person could make. On Monday evening though, I saw it as an opportunity. In my research of who I need to talk to in order to plant trees along the Federal Interstates and the State Highways, I was beginning to feel like I was repeatedly running my forehead into a brick wall. Hence the opportunity.

There is a strech of about 60 miles between the two cities that is nothing but huge farms that butts right up against the federal property of the Interstate. All that GreenifyNow would need to do is convince the farm owners to let us give them trees, and we will plant them on that border line. It should be easy. If you look hard enough you can see where some of them have attempted to do it themselves but ran out of either time, money, trees or hope. Most likely they just ran out of trees and time.

If you were a farmer with 10 miles of property line bordering the interstate and someone came knocking on your door asking if you would like them to plant blue spruce trees every twenty feet along that border... What would you say? Tell me by hitting the comments link below.

I know I would say yes, I would say hell yes!

There is about 60 miles where there is nothing but farmland bordering the interstate on both sides=120 linear miles to possibly plant=633600 linear feet to plant/a tree every 20 feet=31680 possible trees to plant! That is a healthy start!

Think... How many miles of Interstate in the United States are like that? Not to mention how many miles a we wasting our tax dollars on building huge concrete sound barriers, when it could be planting beautiful trees? Please leave your comments by clicking the link below, about what you think of the idea, and then make a donation to make this possible.

Thank you for everything,
Ryan Rodgers

FAQ

These are some of the questions that we have been asked. The list will grow as we are asked more questions. If you would like to ask a question, please do not hesitate. Ask here: rrodgers@greenifynow.org .

-What can I do to help?

The best thing that anyone could do to help is to donate to our cause. For every $2 donated a tree is planted.

- I don't have much money what can I do to help?

The answer is be creative. If you really want to help you can do something as little as directing people that you know to the website. The goal of GreenifyNow is to raise enough funds to plant as many trees as possible, the more people that know about us, the more trees we can plant. We have also been asked if it is appropiate to raise funds in ____ way? Sure, if you want to raise funds in any way, it would be much appreciated.

- How are you going to keep track of how many trees you plant?

We plan to count every one... no way. We have set up plans for a rotation pattern of 1000 pots. All those pots will be either full or empty at any given time, with your help they can stay full. A count of 1 cycle = 1000 trees. In the future that number will increase exponentially by 10 to 10,000 and hold there for a while, by that point we will be very busy.