California Rare Fruit Growers – West LA Chapter
because the best things in life do grow on trees
Tom del Hotal, a long-time San Diego chapter member, has created dozens upon dozens of fully-illustrated presentations and briefer handouts on topic ranging from Air-layering to the handout shown here: Rare Fruit for Climates with Relatively Frost Free Winters.
By illustration, this 5-page handout is the distillation of an 81-page .pdf on the same topic. Find them all here.
Where: Field Trips are for members only. Please check your newsletter or contact us for the address.
This is the first of our workshop/field trips. Various members (and perhaps some outside experts) will share their mostly gentle ways of handling invasions. If you have found a solution that you want to share, definitely let us know and we will slot you in ( no bazookas, please)!
Also, please do not bring samples of your critters to the meeting. We do NOT want to infest our gracious hosts’ yard. If you have a problem you want help with, take a clear photo and send to https://www.whatsthatbug.com/ask-whats-that-bug/. Once you have an ID we can brainstorm at the meeting.
Please DO bring samples of whatever you have ripening right now for our fruit calendar. Also snacks to share and plants to sell would be nice.
As you may have noticed at our last meeting, we have decided to follow the LA Chapter’s lead and substitute the Silent Auction format for Plant Raffles. The selling and then drawing of tickets just became too cumbersome, especially at the Culver City location where we had to be out of the room precisely at noon. Member Jane Coogan Beer will be supplying us with a handy sign-up sheet for each item. The minimum starting price will be on it. If you have signed up for a plant, please listen for the announcements at 11:50 (Last Call) and 11:55 (Auction Closed) so you can claim your prize if you have won. If the top bidder doesn’t respond to the Closing Announcement, the item will go to the next highest bidder.
WHEN: August 12th @ 10 am (promptly!)
LOCATION: Multipurpose Room, Veterans Memorial Building, 4117 Overland Ave., Culver City 90230
Mark Steele, a CRFG member and a member of the Los Angeles chapter, is an avid fruit grower who lives in Ventura. His small yard is packed with various fruiting plants, especially bananas. He currently grows about 20 different varieties of bananas, most of which he has succeeded in fruiting. He became obsessed with bananas after receiving one as a birthday gift from a friend about seven years ago.
Mark is a professor of biology at CSU Northridge where he teaches various marine biology classes and does research of marine fishes. His talk will cover the basics of banana biology and provide advice about varieties that do well in Southern California and how to grow them.
If you have eaten a home-grown banana, you know that they are very much sweeter and tastier than those you buy in the grocery store. According to the CRFG Fruit Facts, bananas are “fast-growing herbaceous perennials arising from underground rhizomes,” not trees. They are a plant that can be grown quite successfully here in Southern California if they are given proper soil conditions and are protected from temperatures below freezing. Mark will tell us more about how to do this successfully.
Plan to come and learn a lot more about growing bananas!
Also please bring fruit and other treats to share with our members.
Please bring any plants that you have to raffle or sell! Sharing plant material and related information is what CRFG is all about.