It is a mystery

Yeah-- the apple trees on the farm are mostly all being written off as probably ancient and dying, but it would be nice to save some of the ones that are actually good producers and well-suited to the place. THey're all scattered around the hedgerows, and many of them are so old they might well predate the Behuniaks (who bought the place from the original 1770s family in 1940). They're in inconvenient locations, but it's nice to have them around.

I hate those intensive tiny orchards!! And that's awesome, that he has cool old varieties!!

My thought on grafting is that if you can just get some decent rootstocks, you could then go nuts saving people's old weird apple trees that they have, and get some unique stuff going. There's no point just growing the same stuff everyone else is, they can make more money doing it with the weird intensive tiny orchards.

Aaron's pondering doing the figs in pots in the greenhouse thing, but as it is they don't heat that greenhouse during the worst part of the winter, they only turn it on once the seeds need starting. If he had things he had to keep alive, they'd have to heat it all winter, and that's a lot of propane.
(Zack has a niggling scheme somewhere that he'd love to combine the heat and moisture of maple sugaring with somehow heating a greenhouse, but he can't figure out how to make it work. Someday. In the meantime they're just not sugaring because it's not possible to be economical without scaling way up.)

I think my parents' chestnut trees are doing well because they're pretty isolated. I'm pretty sure they aren't Chinese?

Oh, I'm not saying you should've done anything from seeds-- you have such a complicated logistical underpinning to the whole thing, with your commute and all. But for the future.

Yes-- they would like to finish hogs on acorns or whatever, but that's like. a distant kind of deal. More pressing is putting up roofs over heads so fatalities go down. (You weren't around yet when they lost a whole hog farrowing, two sows' entire litters, to a sudden cold snap. That's what keeps the meat operation from turning a profit, things like that...)

I keep thinking I should probably take up forestry as my own little side project on that farm, though. I should start a bunch of oak trees from acorns and make a grove myself. And over where the old christmas tree farm is, I should do some clearing and plant a walnut grove so they can sell that lumber in their retirement, or their kids can sell it when they start out farming. Long-long-long term plans, here. ...
I'd also like to root out all the invasives in the woods near the yurt and replant it all to be a native forest garden, but as far as I've gotten with that is yanking out an entire garden cart full of garlic mustard last year, which feat I imagine I'll need to repeat this year. (Didn't put it in the compost, threw it in the mud near the loafing shed where the seedlings will get trampled down. If I do it earlier this year I'll make it into pesto and eat it!)