Propagating and sharing cuttings

Gardening can get expensive, am I right?  Think of the average garden plot and multiply that by...you know what?  Too much math.  Lets just say my garden in nearly .25 acre.  I needed to learn to propagate by myself instead of buying everything from the local nursery, even if it is my happy place.  So I set out to figure it out.  I started with grapes.  I had no idea what I was doing, but as my good friend told me "Plants want to grow. They will, if you give them a chance."  I planted 10 grape cuttings, two survived.  Just two.  Like I said, I had no idea what I was doing.  The next time I tired it, I planted three and all three survived!  I was like a kid on Christmas morning, seeing those new leaves open up.  Next, I learned how to take one large comfrey plant and break its giant root into 5 pieces so I could have more than one plant.  When my raspberries had been in the ground for a couple of years I dug up a few canes and moved them to make new raspberry beds.  The first time I planted 6 canes and only one survived.  The second time, after I had learned, I planted five and three survived. When a branch from my favorite rose bush was broken off with a new bud I thought I would try rooting it.  I succeeded!
 Learning to propagate and graft is a really great skill to help you with permaculturing.  If you have been following along you know how much I LOVE comfrey!  The kind I have will grow big and bushy, but it won't spread unless you disturb it's roots.  They are easy to propagate because you can dig it up, break of a root chunk with a leaf or two and grow an entire plant.  

Don't think this hasn't come with failures.  Of the five rhubarb plants I planted only one has survived.  Two were from the store, and three from friends who shared.  I learned that rhubarb really likes shade and planting thee in the sun was a BAD idea.  The other one was devoured by the dreaded earwig.

My next goal is to learn to graft.  I have a cherry tree, an apricot, two plum, three peach of different varieties, two apple of different varieties, and two pairs that have 5 varieties grafted in.  Those pears got me to thinking that if all my trees were grafted with different varieties then I could have more peaches, on less trees.  Here's another way you can save some money.  My neighbor has a different variety of cherry then I do, if I asked for one of her branches I could graft in onto my cherry tree and have two kind of cherries.  It's also a great way to extend the harvest since different varieties mature at different times.

So, before you start to feel overwhelmed with the cost of gardening, look around you. Can you find a wild rose growing in the woods that you can dig up and take home?  Does your friend have a comfrey plant you can share?  Does your neighbor have grapes?