Public gardens around Sacramento and the San Francisco Bay Area

Sacramento State University Arboretum 

UC Davis Arboretum 

Sonoma Botanical Garden in Glen Ellen 

UC Botanical Garden in Berkeley 

Tilden Regional Park Botanic Garden in Berkeley 

Ruth Bancroft Garden in Walnut Creek 

Rare Fruit Tree Grove at the Quarry Lake Regional Recreational Area in Fremont 

California Nursery Historical Park in Fremont 

Shinn Historical Park and Arboretum in Fremont 

San Francisco Botanical Garden

Emma Prusch Farm Park in San Jose 

Hakone Estate and Gardens - Japanese Gardens in Saratoga

Filoli Historic House and Garden in Woodside

UC Santa Cruz Arboretum and Botanic Garden

Gilroy Gardens Family Theme Park hosts Bonfante trees

Pollen granules of yangmei, Myrica rubra

I took the above pictures of the pollen granules on March 19, 2023. These were from the Adam selection of yangmei ( Myrica rubra ).

Cuttings sale in March 2023

 The post describes the spring sale of wood on the Really Good Plants site.

The following accessions will be available for purchase on March 5 at 5 pm PT at reallygoodplants.com

The number after each cultivar states the initial inventory.

The sale will conclude on Saturday March 11 at 5 pm.

Avocado

Aravaipa 15

Sir Prize 10

Royal-Wright 25

Surinam Cherry 

Guaruja Red 20

the scions are pencil thick or thicker.  Please specify if you need the thinner ones.

Feijoa

Candy 14

Lickver’s Pride 12

Chesterwoody 16

Den’s Choice 16

White Goose 10

Marion 13

Albert’s supreme 11

Cherimoya 

Fortuna 10

Mulberry (some buds are getting green)

Galicia 8

Shelli 10

Isfahan 10

White Sapote

Golden Globe 14

Santa Cruz 7

Malibu #3 7

Rainbow 11

Malibu #1 10

Delta Gold 15

Michelle 6

Lemon Gold 15

Cuccio 9

Leroy 9

Roberts Rainbow 19

Yangmei 

Female Eve 20

Male Adam 10

Yangmei selections Adam and Eve

 These post describes two selections of yangmei (Myrica rubra).  Adam is a vigorous male with abundant red flowers.

Eve is a mid to late season producing female with complex flavored and very juicy fruits. The fruits are a tad smaller than an average Biqi fruit.  In the picture below I have a large Biqi fruit (left) next to Eve (right).  

The seeds are also a little smaller in Eve (below right) than in Biqi (left).

I grow these accessions for three years and the grafts started blooming in 15 months. I had the fruits in the last two seasons. My grafts are on the Myrica pensilvanica rootstock. The scions of both accessions will be occasionally available at reallygoodplants.com

John Herd and Sir Prize avocados

 The post describes the first fruits I collected from the grafts of John Herd and Sir Prize avocados residing on my mature Mexicola tree. 

Sir Prize was grafted in 2016, and produced and ripened the first 5 fruits 2022-2023. It is a vigorous graft, with 5-6 feet of upright growth. However, it appears to be a shy producer. The pictures below show the second fruit harvested in January 2023.

The texture is very smooth with no fibers at all, and low oil content. The flavor is very clean, a vegetable type with no strong notes. I hope it will become more complex in the later harvested fruits. We had a very cold November- December here in the Sacramento Valley. The weather might have impacted the proper development of the fruit oils and flavors.

John Herd was grafted in 2020 and the fruit described is the first one produced just 2 years after grafting. The fruit stem was broken by a rodent in January 2023, otherwise I would keep it on the tree longer. Never the less, the fruit ripened fine on the counter in about a week. 

This fruit is pretty good flavored, a bit nutty, and with a better oil content. More complex in the flavor than my Sir Prize fruit. The texture is smooth with no fibers. This branch is lower on the tree than the Sir Prize branch and could have been exposed less to the cold masses this winter.

Cuttings sale in December 2022

Update: the sale has concluded.

This posts describes the cuttings sale on reallygoodplants.com in December 2022.

The sale will open at 9:30 AM PST on December 11.

1. This year we have not collected the scions in advance, and will cut them "to order". This means that the order shipping might be delayed by the weather conditions, but we don't expect to have more than 10 days between the order placement and shipping.  This also means that we don't know how many scions we actually can ship.  We did our best estimate, and we might be able to restock some cultivars after the shipment of early orders.

2. Some cultivars are not linked to descriptions, as we have not evaluated them in the detail yet. You should be able to google some of these, like Aussie and Taiwanese Long mulberries, and Sakerdze pomegranate.  We don't know yet if Pakistan "Large fruited" is the same as Pakistan.  Galicia and Shelli are fat black mulberries from Ukraine. Tabriz and Isfahan are fat white, pure sweet mulberries from Iran.  These are similar to Buluklu. Frank mulberry is a sweet fat pink. Hassan Krasni apricot is a seedling from a seed received by the USDA from the former USSR. 

3. All avocados, TX persimmon, apricots, sour cherry, Che, feijoa, and loquat have to be grafted. TX persimmon will not graft onto D. kaki, you need to have a seedling of TX persimmon for rootstock. The avocado wood does not store for long.  Its is fine to graft avocados now in a greenhouse or SoCal, but could be problematic in the CA Central Valley. For those who want to graft later, we will have another sale of avocado and white sapote wood in March. 

Many mulberries will not root, especially the long fruited ones, and Illinois Everbearing. Plan on grafting these.  Here is the post on mulberry rooting abilities you may want to check. Senjed roots for me, but you may want to graft it on Russian olive as a backup. Adara plum also roots for me, but a number of people had trouble rooting it.  Plan on grafting a piece for a backup. All pomegranates root fine.  If you want to graft them, make sure to graft onto strong young shoots.  More about grafting in this post.

Ube, Dioscorea alata

This post describes my first experience growing ube plants in Davis. In the spring of 2022 I started 3 plants from one tuber that was gifted to me. I cut the tuber in 3 pieces and dried them for a week or two. After planting, every piece produced a plant, and I passed one onto a friend. The other two grew fine, but the one in the sunny spot was more vigorous. By the early December the vines started to wilt and I decided to collect the tubers. 

The new tuber I found under the plant in the shady spot was small and already partially rotten. There are maybe more tubers, but the pot I grew it in has other plants which I didn’t want to disturb. 

The plant in the sunny spot produced two nice tubers, all pictures below are from the same plant.

The small piece in the picture below is the tuber chunk this plant was started from.

These turned out to be not connected by the tuber tissue 

The tubers are deep purple inside. Now I need to figure out what to do with these.