Today I had a great gardening-related day.

I drove over to San Francisco for the California Rare Fruit Grower’s 2006 Golden Gate Chapter Scion Exchange.

When I first went in, I was so overwhelmed by the number of bags of scions (cuttings). This was my first time at any gardening function like this and I didn’t know quite what to do… so I told the woman at the door that I’ve never been to anything like this and I asked what do people here.

She explained that you basically go through the tables of bags filled with scions and if you see something you like, take 1 or 2. Then take some tape and label your scion with the name that was on the bag. They had so many varieties of different fruit trees, like apples, pears, asian pears, peaches, asian and european plums, nectarines, pluots, figs, pomegranate, kiwi, grapes, mulberries, persimmons and more.

Their were many group members who were happy to answer your questions. One of they said that even if I didn’t know how to graft trees, there were some scions that can be rooted like the figs, kiwis and pomegranate. At 1pm the had a grafting demonstration, which was very informative. There’s nothing like actually seeing someone do it up close.

I made a flickr set ( link ) with some photos from the event. Clicking many of the photos below will link you there.

In total I got about 25 varieties of fruit scions:

A list of the varieties of scions I got