“You’ll need a very sharp knife,” says Paul Barnett, a horticulturalist. Outside his home in southern England, 250 different apple varieties ripen on a single tree — everything from the common Golden Delicious to the rare and bitter cultivars bred for making cider. You could create what’s sometimes called a fruit-­cocktail tree by grafting a nectarine together with, say, a peach, a plum and an apricot, or manipulating a lemon tree to also grow grapefruits. But Barnett prefers a more traditional approach. “Keep apples with apples and pears with pears,” he says.

Barnett mostly uses a technique called chip budding, which is done in the late summer. Take your blade and cut a twig of new growth from the tree whose fruit you want to clone. Look for a protruding bud toward the bottom, and use your knife to peel off a one-inch-long section around it, cutting just deeper than the bark. Take that shoot, called a scion, to the robust tree you’ve chosen as your base, or rootstock. Use your knife to cut out a similarly shaped, one-inch tab from a branch of rootstock about the thickness of your pinkie finger. Slide the piece of bud and bark from your scion over the hole you cut in your rootstock, matching the edges. Wrap tape around the joint. In six weeks, remove the tape. “In that time, the two surfaces will heal and grow together,” Barnett says. In two to four years, that small bud will grow into limbs that produce fruit. “Mind your fingers during all this,” says Barnett, who has survived several accidental slips of the knife.

Some 7,500 varieties of apples exist worldwide, so don’t feel confined to the few boldface names familiar from the supermarket. If you’re looking for unusual types, you might try nurseries, horticultural clubs and old orchards. Or find other fruit growers who will swap little sprigs of favorite cultivars, which you can then graft. Barnett started his 250-­variety apple tree in 1989, when he was 16. Since then, he has become something of an apple evangelist. “There are so many different varieties,” Barnett says. “I’m confident everyone can find one they bite into and think, Oh, that’s really nice.”