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Educational materials 

The new essential educational materials and videos with voice and subtitles are created about topics essential for starting and maintaining the museum garden.

One of the challenges across Europe is the destruction of old gardens, that may lead to permanent loss of heritage plant varieties. We encourage gardeners to reproduce the old valuable varieties by a set of support materials developed on plant propagation. Educational material on grafting and other types of propagation will also be suitable for the museum workers.

How to build a garden bed in an unfertile soil?

Latvian Open Air Museum is located in dunes. Pine trees, hardy plants, plain sand is most often the starting conditions for the new garden beds near exhibited buildings and equipment. The gardener from Latvian Permaculture Association shows the right approach for building the garden bed that will take care about heritage plants under such a rough circumstances.

How to establish heritage plant collection in the museum?

How to start gardening in the museum? Where to find apropriate plants? What are the principles museum should hold on when establishing herritage plant collection? Estonian Open Air Museum shows their experience and know-hows.

How to grow heritage plants' seeds?

Seeds from heritage plants come to museums at really small amounts. To keep the collection healthy and safe the special effort of selection and saving seeds should be needed. Danish Seed savers show their example of selection, overwintering and seed saving of Amager White Cabbage.

How to maintain already established heritage plant garden in museum?

Cesis Medieval Castle Museum established kitchen garden while ago. The beginning was not too easy, but maintenance of the garden beds, scaling up to the next achievements, telling stories to the visitors is keeping busy more than one gardener in the gardening season. Some know-hows from the Main gardener of the Cesis Castle.

Heritage plants of Estonia

Registred Heritage varieties in Estonia described.

Grafting for saving historical fruit gardens: Whip and tongue grafting

Grafting is a technique used to reproduce plant varieties that are not true-to-seed, meaning that they will not produce similar fruit (or other features) if reproduced by the seed. When grafting, certain parts of two plants are joined together in a particular way, so that the cambium layer of those parts matches. If this is done correctly, they grow as a single plant. Grafting can be used to reproduce fruit tree varieties and can be performed by any gardener.

Grafting for saving historical fruit gardens: Modified whip and tongue grafting

Modified whip and tongue is a grafting technique used in cases where rootstock is larger in diameter than the scion, but not sufficiently large to use bark grafting method. The technique is quite similar to conventional whip and tongue method, just the rootstock is not cut across the whole diameter. Similarly to whip and tongue, it can be used to reproduce apples, pears, stonefruit and many other species.

Grafting for saving historical fruit gardens: Bark grafting

Bark grafting is one of the easiest grafting techniques and can be performed by practically anyone. It is used if the rootstocks is of significantly larger diameter than the scion.

Grafting for saving historical fruit gardens: Chip budding

Chip budding is a variation of budding, but actually more a form of grafting. It has become more popular with the advent of parafilm, which helps to seal the graft union very well and prevent drying. The advantage of chip budding over other budding techniques is that it can be performed outside the period when the bark slips that limits the time window for t-budding technique.

Propagation by layering

Rooting is a technique of vegetative plant propagation that produces a plant identical to the original plant. This method has many variations, such as rooting hardwood, semi-hardwood, softwood cuttings, (basic) layering, stool layering, air layering and tip layering.

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