Our famous annual Grafting Demos and Scion Exchange will take place on February 10th in the Multi-Purpose Room and its adjacent Patio at the Culver City Veterans Memorial Building.
We will have demonstrations of three grafting techniques, including the use of the common cleft graft (such as you would use with stone fruit), the side veneer graft (such as you would use for avocados) and the traditional whip-and-tongue graft. You will be able to get up close and observe every detail of these techniques. Our grafters will be available to answer your grafting questions.
With grafting, you can build your own fruit tree, with multiple varieties of apples, peaches, pears, sapotes, cherimoyas, etc. You can even have peaches, nectarines, plums, and pluots on the same tree, or almonds on one side of your tree and plums on the other. You can completely graft over a non-productive variety (called topworking). With grafting, the possibilities are almost unlimited.
We will also have our annual scion wood exchange, so please bring your scion wood to share. If we all bring wood, we should have many different varieties from many different trees. If you have rootstock growing in small pots, please bring them to the meeting and take home a grafted plant or share your rootstock with others. Remember to bring extra bags, labels, and a marker for the scion wood you collect!
At the exchange, please limit your selections to two of any variety until everyone has had an opportunity to collect wood. Then feel free to go back. Please do not collect wood you do not plan to use. By the way, members who have paid for 2018 and who bring in scions to share will get first choice of scion wood that they want to use in their own gardens. So, if you haven’t renewed for 2018 (both WLA and CRFG, Inc.), now might be a good time to send your dues to Andrée.
To minimize chaos and give our speakers the respect they deserve, we are adopting the following schedule.
10:00 – 10:15: Registration and scion wood donation
10:15 to 11:15: Demonstrations of grafting on the patio
11:15 to 11:30: Scion exchange open to members in the Multi-Purpose Room
11:30 to 11:45: Scion exchange open to non-members in the Multi-Purpose Room
No one will be allowed to enter the Multi-Purpose Room during the grafting demonstrations (unless it rains).
Note: There will also be a sale of quite sizable Blue Passionflower vines grown by one of our members, Terry Brockert. These are considered a great pollinator for other passionflower vines. You can read more about them here.