California Rare Fruit Growers – West LA Chapter
because the best things in life do grow on trees
We had a great turn-out, wonderful participation, an amazing speaker and lots of supplies (plus snacks!). Who could ask for anything more? Well, you, since you have asked for Jeff’s slide show and also his link to CRFG-member Tom Waldren’s video on air layering. So here they are. Enjoy.
Jeff notes the audio in Tom’s video is not great but it is still well worth watching. Thank you, Jeff! And thank you to all our members and potential-members for be willing to get your hands dirty.
We heard this morning from the California Department of Food and Agriculture: “On behalf of the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s (CDFA) Plant Health and Pest Prevention Services (PHPPS) Division, working in coordination with the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Los Angeles County Agricultural Commissioner, and Ventura County Agricultural Commissioner, we are pleased to share the Mediterranean fruit fly quarantine in Los Angeles County and the Queensland fruit fly quarantine in Los Angeles and Ventura counties have been lifted…One active invasive fruit fly quarantine remains in place in California – the Oriental fruit fly quarantine San Bernardino and parts of Riverside County. To view the quarantine map, please visit CAFruitFly.com.
While the news of these quarantine lifts is promising, the threat to California’s agriculture and economy still remains. CDFA is urging residents and industry members across the state to remain vigilant for signs of other invasive pests to help prevent any future infestations of invasive species.”
Photo of Oriental Fruit Fly from USDA/Scott Bauer
Jeff is the chair of the Orange County Chapter of CRFG and– like many of that grand chapter’s members — is a master propagator. While we have demos of grafting once every year at our February scion exchange (and twice this year with Arnie Bernstein’s talk on citrus grafting in June) we haven’t had a discussion of Air Layering in a very long time.
Air Layering is an astonishingly easy way to produce nicely rooted specimens from otherwise impossible to propagate trees or varieties, though of course it also works on the easy-to-root-or-graft like figs. It is a technique we should all have in our fruit growing tool kits.
This will be a combination lecture and workshop so feel free to bring one of your favorite trees (in a pot of course!) and you will be able to take it home ready to produce a Mini-Me. Please also bring your own favorite knife since air layering does require a small amount of surgery. We will provide the rest of the stuff you will need to complete the job.
And hey, the fruit is ripening out there! Pick some of what you’re growing to share with the rest of us. Other snacks are also always welcome.
BTW, we are back in our beloved MultiPurpose Room, Culver City Veterans Memorial Building, 4117 Overland Ave, Culver City, CA
Despite being booted out of our regular meeting room and sent into exile across Culver Blvd at the last minute, we had a major turn out last Saturday and Arny Bernstein, sharing his vast experience with grafting citrus, was just fantastic. Because of many many requests, he has made his Power Point presentation available to us and you can see it here. We are now talking with Arny about doing a hands-on grafting class at next February’s scion exchange. Wahoo.
We have just been informed that the entire Culver City Veterans Memorial Building is being pre-empted for city training on Saturday. As a result, we are being moved across Culver Boulevard to the Culver City Senior Center which has ample parking and a room virtually the same size (though not our nifty patio, sniff). We will be in Suite C, 4095 Overland Avenue Culver City, CA 90232.
There is a parking lot entrance on the southbound side of Overland north of Culver Boulevard. If you are coming north on Overland, make the left on Culver and then right into the parking lot. If you are going east on Culver, you will have to make the U-turn at Overland and go into the lot from the north side of Culver.
We have been told that Suite C is on your right as you enter the Center.
Five things you should know:
One: Arny has over 80 different varieties grafted onto his 20 to 25 citrus trees, so clearly the man knows what he is doing.
Second: if you glance at the photo above, you will see Arny demonstrating cleft grafting at our scion exchange in 2017 ; so you know he has long been an excellent teacher as well. (He also supervised our graft-your-own session in 2019 and zero blood was shed.) As if this isn’t enough, he has been running the Grafting Program at UC Berkeley for the past two years and is also establishing a grafting program at Lotusland in Montecito. With Bill Brandt, he teaches grafting throughout the LAUSD high school system. Having joined CRFG in the early 70s, he is perhaps its oldest member and fondly remembers being taught grafting back then by Wilbur Wood, one of the grand old men of our organization.
Third: February was deciduous grafting season; but this is citrus grafting season. It is time to strike while the iron is hot and the bark is slipping.
Fourth: since the arrival of Citrus Greening disease, it is illegal for us to exchange citrus scion wood. The only legal source in California is the Citrus Clonal Protection Program at UC Riverside. You can order some truly amazing varieties here. Registration is free. The budwood, alas, is not.
This page has links to a video explaining the order process along with some grafting demos from the talented Fruitmentor. Note that cutting is only done once a month. If you want your scion wood in your fridge ready to use after Arny’s class, you should have your order in by June 2nd. It will ship June 5th.
And Fifth: We will be back in our regular MultiPurpose Room in Culver City. Your favorite snacks and/or fruit to share will be most welcome.
Eighteen or so of us braved the 405 yesterday morning to visit Rancho Los Cerritos and then Ricardo’s Nursery. Many of us were so impressed by both that return trips are already being planned.
At the Rancho, docents who had generously boned up on the parks “rare fruit” ahead of our arrival were able to display the gardens and orchards originally laid out by the groundbreaking SoCal landscape architect Ralph D. Cornell in 1931, as well as some amazing trees — including a rambling pomegranate — dating back to the mid 1800s. Over the past 32 years, the staff horticulturist Marie Barnidge-McIntyre has been researching and restoring and maintaining the trees Cornell originally chose. We got to see such unusual specimens as the Kashlen, Lyon and Puebla avocado trees, a thornless jujube, a huge black locust that was a local landmark for 150 years and California’s original Sweet Orange. Not to mention the macadamia, loquat, persimmon, dwarf thornless pomegranate and many many other trees.
Ricardo Ortiz, generously waiting as we straggled in from the Rancho, served us his sorbet made from his amazing Persian mulberries and lectured on both his nursery’s fairly recent swivel to tropical fruit, lessons he learned in the process and his newfound love of grafting. We were able to pick fresh Persian mulberries from one of his enormous trees and admire the vanilla orchid in his greenhouse along with many many other plants in various stages of growth. Needless to say, a great time was had by all.
We are going back to Long Beach! Yes, it’s not exactly West Los Angeles, but we had such a great time with Jorge Ochoa at Long Beach City College last July, and so many of you seemed willing to make the trek down there, that we decided to explore more of this amazing area.
Our first stop will be Rancho Los Cerritos, an incredible hidden gem which I stumbled upon while researching old fruit trees in the Los Angeles area. The Rancho website (check it out!) blew my mind. In 1930, when construction of the tropical and semi-tropical fruit orchard was underway, eleven cogged stones were discovered. Dating to 2-5,000 BC, they represent the earliest presence of Native Americans in the area. Between then and now, the area followed the path of most other vast swathes of land in California: home to the Tongva/Gabrielino people for centuries, land-granted to a Spanish soldier in 1784 before being broken down into tracts for his heirs, sold off for ranching and then farming, falling into disrepair, being restored in 1930 as a summer residence and finally bequeathed to the City of Long Beach which opened it as a rare glimpse into Old California in 1955.
The 1844 adobe, which still stands, was the home of the cattle-raising Temple family and then several generations of sheep-raising Bixbys. There have been fruit trees on the site since the building of the adobe, including lemon, orange, and pomegranate. During the 1930s remodel, tropical and subtropical fruit trees were planted along the south side of the historic adobe house for shade. The orchard includes citrus, loquats, sapotes, cherimoyas, macadamias, avocados, and guavas; and was able to provide the Bixbys with fruit almost ten months of the year.
I have asked for a tour specifically of the old orchard, but there is also a Backyard Garden with the pomegranates from the 1840s as well as a water tower used long before climate change made this a “modern” idea. To top everything off, there is a mature California Native Garden which should enable us to see many of the plants Antonio spoke about last week.
After our visit to Rancho Los Cerritos, we have been welcomed to Ricardo’s Nursery just 4 miles north. This is a vast wholesale nursery open to the public, with many tropical and semi-tropical fruit trees for sale. Since we will be there the day before Mother’s Day, the nursery will probably be busy, but owner Ricardo Ortiz – originally from Oaxaca and specializing in tropical fruit from that area — has promised to reserve some parking spots for us and will speak to us if he can manage it.
Please note: field trips are for chapter members only. You will receive sign-up instructions with your newsletter.
Inspired by a comment on the original article, here is an update on our Great Rhubarb Experiment. In a word (okay, two words) , it is an astonishing success. We continue to trial new varieties. In the photo above, Crimson Sunrise is the plant in front on the far right. while Red Surprise and Ebony are elsewhere in the yard. But for all of us, Tina’s Noble continues to be the huge, vigorous standout. It has now grown continuously for three and half years, slowing down in only the very hottest part of the summer but never going entirely dormant and coming back better than ever with the winter rains. You can see in this photo
that my original plant has developed three different heads (probably not the correct term) and will need to be divided when I can figure out the appropriate time.
For sweetness and tenderness, however, Success is my favorite. (It is the two plants on the front left in the top photo, the smaller just planted this year). It tends to flourish at different times of year from the Tina’s Noble. As a result we are all harvesting at least six to nine months out of twelve.
At this point, we haven’t ordered new seeds and therefore will probably not be offering anything other than plants thinned from our gardens. Since seedlings are always iffy (just beyond my massive Tina’s Noble plant is one that is not doing as well) growing from divisions will probably yield more reliable plants in the future.
This not-to-be-missed Zoom will be a guided tour of various native plant foods, including fruits, greens, seeds and more, that can be added to your local landscapes and diets. Lecture will include how to grow each plant in local gardens, and how to use one or various parts of the plant in recipes. Among the many plants to be covered include:
Cleveland Sage
CA Wild Grape
Huckleberry
Saltbush
Golden Currant
Hummingbird Sage
Honey Mesquite
And many more
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Antonio Sanchez is the nursery manager and restoration volunteer outreach coordinator for SAMOFund in Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, and has been working around native plants for nearly 2 decades. He is co-founder and lead singer of the native plant band Sage Against the Machine (hear him sing “I Want to Be Native Plant“!), and was lead organizer for the California Native Food Symposium, the Southern California Monarch and Milkweed Conference, the first Ventura County Native Plant Symposium, and the California Native Sage Festival. Antonio has worked at various native plant institutions around the state, and has managed the nurseries at Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden, worked as a landscaper at the Santa Barbara Botanic Garden, worked as a nursery technician at the Theodore Payne Foundation for Native Plants, and co-founded and ran Nopalito Native Plant Nursery in Ventura, CA, with a good friend and a cousin, for nearly 4 years. He believes in making native plants fun and approachable to all, learning about and teaching old and new ways with native plants, and that Hummingbird Sage is probably the prettiest California native sage, but Salvia pachyphylla is a close second.
Note: a similar sold-out event is occurring at Artemesia Nursery in LA this weekend. If you want to see details of the kind of subjects (and recipes!) Antonio will be covering, you can find them here.