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Early Winter Fruit Harvests of Santa Cruz and Monterey

On December 1, we held our annual Holiday Potluck at the Santa Cruz Live Oak Grange, one of our most important community-focused events for the membership of the Monterey Bay Chapter of California Rare Fruit Growers.  At this event we meet new and old friends to discuss our year in fruit gardening, share ripe harvests and delicious home cooking, and peer forward to our group’s year to come.

Setting up some festive table centerpieces.

This year’s potluck drew an interesting and illuminating array of winter’s-eve fruit harvests from Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, where some microclimates have already seen their first light frosts.  The images below depict a nice cross-section of what’s ripe right now, though not an exhaustive list.  Please do feel free to comment below with any notable omissions of fruits you’re picking this time of year (fall-winter cusp) from your Monterey Bay garden.

A display of a few of the subtropicals (and other fruits) available for ripe harvest on December 1 around Santa Cruz and the Monterey Bay area.

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Blackberry and Raspberry Tour at Pacific Berry Breeding

The Monterey Bay chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers extends many thanks to breeder Ellen Thompson and field manager Juan of Pacific Berry Breeding in Watsonville, CA, for leading yesterday’s exhaustive and elucidating tour of their caneberry breeding facility. Pacific Berry Breeding, one of only a handful of caneberry breeding operations spread across the globe, works with material from public breeding institutions and germplasm repositories, and under contract with major commercial berry producers, to develop novel varieties of blackberry and raspberry for the fresh market.

Ellen demonstrated for us the traditional breeding methods employed here, showing her technique for making controlled crosses via manual pollination. She discussed how seedling varieties are evaluated for quality and commercial viability, and how seedlings are chosen to advance from season to season as “selections”, and then as “advanced selections” suitable for larger field trials. Fewer than 2% of of an initial cohort of seedlings will make it as far as propagation for extensive trials.

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A Visit to Ken’s Bobcat Ridge Avocado Farm

'Hass' avocado

Following our fascinating extended tour of Pacific Berry Breeding, a dozen of us with the afternoon free reconvened at chapter secretary Ken Konviser’s Bobcat Ridge homestead avocado farm for a tasty potluck lunch and tour of his gardens.

Jujubes, autumn olives, and muscadines brought by CRFG members to sample at the potluck

At Ken’s hillside farm with a broad view overlooking the valleys of Corralitos and out to the bay, and beyond his tidy rows of terraced vegetables and healthy small orchard of numerous avocado varieties for market, we also enjoyed examining some of the more exotic specimens that he’s planted.

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Welcome to our new chapter website

This website was designed with the intention to be your reference point for all of the most important things happening with the Monterey Bay chapter of CRFG.

Check in with our current calendar of events, send your friends to our new online membership form, and see photos of local fruit happenings on our news blog.

We’ve built this website for our membership, so please let us know any ways it can better serve you. In fact, you can contact our chapter board directly through this site at the link above!