Hi, I'm Remy. These are my friends, Aurora and Luca.

We’re visiting Ryan and his students at a place to grow a plant called a greenhouse. Brian’s going to be showing us some cool things that will help us learn about grafting in the allegory of the olive tree.

Let’s check it out!

[UPBEAT MUSIC PLAYING]

It's fun to be here with some of my friends learning about horticulture.

That means we're learning about plants.

There are so many reasons why we graft. It's to bring two plants together that make something greater together than they would be separate from each other. This is a plum.

And I grafted it to this peach-plum rootstock. And I took the piece of that plum branch, and I, and I connected it with this rootstock tree right here. Why do you wrap it?

Why do I wrap it? Well, for one thing, if I didn’t wrap it with this parafilm or any other kind of wrapping material, it would dry out and die. Would you actually like to see how we actually do grafting in my classroom?

Let's go. Let's head out.

So what I'm going to do is I'm going to demonstrate how to graft.

And what I'm going to do is then cut here,

and then I'm going to grab my knife. And then Ashton, if you could give me a little bit of distance to keep yourself safe.

So I'll go ahead and cut.

And then you see right inside here this I find to be fascinating. Inside you see growth rings. And so every year that a tree grows a new ring will be added to it. That's where the actual connecting between the root stock and this branch will occur. The next thing I will do is I will score it right here. I will then cut in to the branch with my knife.

This is what we call a tongue cut. And so this will create an opening that the other, the root stock can grab into. Now I’ve got the root stock, because here all the roots, right?

And then I will do, again two thirds up along the cut that I did, I’ll score it.

And then I'll cut into this right here.

And then

what I do

is I bring them together. Isn’t that amazing? Yeah. Isn’t that awesome? So you can see how those two are connected. Like two puzzle pieces.

And so the next thing we'll do is I'll get a little bit of this buddy tape

and wrap it around the two of them. So this serves two purposes, this buddy tape. One is it keeps the moisture in but also acts as as a way to bind them two together so they don't fall apart.

In the Book of Mormon, one of the prophets early in the Book of Mormon, his name is Jacob. He's a younger brother of Nephi.

He shared with us the allegory of the olive tree.

Well, it so happens I actually have an olive tree here. Jacob, do you mind grabbing it for us? Sure.

Oh, where did that come from?

Actually, we've been growing it for several years here in our greenhouse.

Do any of you know what an allegory is? An allegory is a big word that we don't use that often. It's a means a story or a poem that has some kind of hidden meaning.

He says this in verse 14 of chapter 10 of 1 Nephi. “And after the house of Israel should be scattered” or, you know,

spread across many parts of the world, “they should be gathered together again” through missionary work, for example,

“or in fine, after the Gentiles had received the fullness of the gospel, the natural branches” so the natural branches of the olive tree, “or the remnants of the house of Israel should be grafted in.”

This is where it gets very meaningful to me, “or come to the knowledge of the true Messiah, their Lord, and their Redeemer.”

And if you think about a graft union, they become literally one.

And so for those people who come in through missionary work, through learning the gospel of Jesus Christ, they come to a knowledge of Jesus Christ such that they become one with Him, just like these two become literally one plant.

We become that connected to Jesus Christ.

Thanks, Ryan, that was super cool to learn About. See you next time.