Roundup: Join the Club
Scion exchange, Grange celebrates 126 years, Community Center ED resigns, Lighted Art in Napa
Greetings from chilly Chagrin Falls, Ohio.
We look at two clubs today, the Redwood Empire Chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers and the Sebastopol Grange. I hope to cover more of them in future Roundups, so please let me know about any club you know about.
Be Fruitful
David Ulmer loves fruit trees. He’s still eating fresh pears from a tree of his even in January. “I want fresh fruit from our garden for as long as I can get it,” he said. He carefully refrigerates late ripening pears to keep them this long. His favorite fruit is peaches, but of course David can name one variety after another. I met with David to learn more about the Scion Exchange coming up Saturday, February 17 from 10am to 2pm at the Vets Hall in Santa Rosa, organized by the Redwood Empire Chapter of the California Rare Fruit Growers.
A retired ophthalmologist (a hard word to spell meaning an eye surgeon), David had a dozen fruit trees on a farm he bought in Mississippi where he is from originally. There, he learned from a grafting expert, T.O. Warren, known for the Warren Pear. Now, many years after moving to California, David has more than 300 fruit trees at his home in Sebastopol but one might think that he’s lost count.
David explained that scions are “pieces of wood from an old tree that you graft on rootsock so that your new tree will be the same as the old tree.” Grafting is really the only way to propagate fruit trees and keep a particular variety and grow it on other rootstock. That is, the seeds of plums, apples and pears don’t produce offspring with the same characteristics of the parents. The only way to pass them on is by grafting. Others like grapes, berry, kiwis, pomegranates and figs are usually propagated by cuttings, which can be planted in the ground. Peaches, he said, are self-pollinated so they can pass on their genetics by seed and retain the same characteristics.
The Redwood Empire Scion Exchange is for those who love fruit trees and who enjoy getting together to get new scions from hundreds of varieties of fruit trees from all over the state. They also like to share their knowledge, so David and others like him will demonstrate how to do grafting at the February event. They will even do grafting for you for $5 a graft if you buy the rootstalk. If you plan to go, check out their PDF that explains in detail how to prepare for the event, which is open to the public — members get early admission for first pick.
To join the Redwood Empire club, you have to be a member of California Rare Fruit Growers for $29 and then membership in the local chapter is free. A good club has volunteers, a newsletter, social gatherings and a chance to learn from genial folks like David Ulmer who can tell you about things you didn’t know.
“Do you know about William Silva?” asked David. Silva was an apple breeder from Sebastopol, who in 1940’s developed the Hawaii apple, a cross between a Golden Delicous and a Gravenstein that has the taste and scent of pineapple.
The Grange
The Grange off Hwy 12 is celebrating its 125th year as a local institution this year. “I think just about everybody everybody’s been to the hall, at least once for our craft, fair, or one of our social meetings, or some of our lectures or other events,” Lawrence Jaffe who is the President of The Grange told me. The Grange currently has 126 members.
The purpose of Grange is to enhance the lives of people in rural communities. The Grange has seemed to enjoy a resurgence of interest in recent years. I asked Lawrence why.
“In the last five years, the Grange just put some effort into organizing how we run the Hall. Also we returned almost all the rental money that we earn into upgrading the hall. The new systems and the refurbished Hall make it easier for the community to engage with us.
“We’ve had a dedicated core of members. People enjoy having a low-stress place to come together. It’s a third place. It’s not work; it’s not home. But it’s a welcome and community spot. We welcome just about anybody who wants to do a project, which means that people who want to hold an event, or a series of classes or speeches are able to use our hall and get some support.”
“We host quite a few events each month, all of which can be found at our website sebastopolgrange.org,” said Lawrence. Monthly meetings are open to the public on the last Tuesday of each month. “Our dues are incredibly modest at $33 a year,” said Lawrence.
He mentioned that groups such as the Love Choir, senior ping-pong, the community with family Farmers, and slow foods use the hall as an affordable meeting place on a regular basis. The Grange runs the produce exchange for home gardeners throughout the summer.
“All that, and we’re just nice people who like to have fun.” he said. “I think those are the reasons that we’ve had the resurgence that you mentioned.”
An Eye for Big Eyes
Look what made Sean McGee smile at Hospice Thrift in Sebastopol: he found a signed and numbered print by Margaret Keane, the painter whose story was told in the movie “Big Eyes.” The movie featured Amy Adams as Keane and was set in San Francisco in the 1960’s. Keane died in 2022 in Napa, CA at age 94 and her New York Times obituary called her a “painter of sad-eye waifs.”
Coffee Klatch SRO
Like many, Laura went to Retrograde Coffee for Diana Rich’s “Coffee with a Councilmember” “So many people showed up at Retrograde that they had to move across the street to the Livery Co-work,” Laura explained. “And even there it was standing room only. Looks like this is going to be a successful program!”
What did most people want to talk about? In a word, traffic.
Executive Director of Sebastopol Cultural Community Center stepping down
Mark DeSaulnier, the Executive Director of the Sebastopol Cultural Community Center, has stepped down as of January 31, 2024. A press release from the Center said that DeSaulnier would continue in a consulting role and thanked him for his contributions.
“Mark DeSaulnier has played a pivotal role in steering the SCCC through the challenges of the past two years, particularly during the closure caused by the pandemic. Under his guidance, the Center not only weathered the storm but thrived. The main hall underwent significant improvements, including enhanced lighting and a state-of-the-art sound system, providing a world-class experience for performers and audiences alike.”
In an email to the Sebastopol Times, DeSaulnier outlined the challenges facing the community center. “The SCCC has felt the challenges over the past year specifically around reduced city funding, more difficult grant funding, and as a nonprofit, the need for continued support from the greater community through giving. Classes, camps, concerts, and events continue to steadily grow since re-emerging from COVID, and the SCCC expects to see that trend continue.”
Napa Lights Up
The Napa Lighted Art Festival, a winter night celebration of creative arts, technology and lights, runs through February 16 in the downtown area. The event is free. The festival is a boon for local restaurants who usually struggle this time of year. Napa and its restaurants were crowded on the Saturday night I visited.
The festival features 10 lighted art sculptures but the wonderful projection artwork on three iconic downtown buildings ended last weekend. I shot a short video of the projection “A Journey Through Time” on the Napa County Historic Court House by High Resolution Events.
While the projections are no longer running, the light sculptures will remain up for a few more weeks. They include “House of Cards” by OGE Design Group; “Desert Shark” by Peter Hazel and “Entwined Napa” by Charlie Gadeken.
The Week of January 29 - February 3
Sebastopol’s artists Patrick Amiot and Brigitte Laurent give tours of their Florence Avenue compound and writer Mark Fernquest went on one and took pictures. He called the place a Junkyard Paradise. The article received a dozen “likes.”
Mayor Diana Rich and Vice Mayor Stephen Zollman decided to launch “Coffee with a Council Member”, as Laura explains in her article about its launch this week.
Sebastopol World Friends (SWF) is hosting a delegation of psychologists, social workers and teachers from Ukraine through February 9th. “I really hope all the knowledge and experience that we get here will help me help educators in Ukraine at such a difficult time,” said Hanna Yefimtseva, one of the Ukrainian delegates.
Alice Rathjen, the ceramics department manager at the Sebastopol Center for the Arts, talked to Laura in “Sharing the joy of clay.” Said Alice: “My job is to figure out how to make this wonderful facility be of service to the community.”
Our weekly version of Law & Order plays out (with a lot of reruns) in the Sebastopol Police Logs this week. Mostly drug possession, some vandalism.
Former Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Rogers brought his campaign for State Assembly District 2 to Sebastopol at a gathering at the home of Una Glass. Rogers worked as a staffer first for Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey and then Mike McGuire. Six Democrats and one Repulican are running for the office.
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