HOS's Fruit Propagation Fair and Scion Exchange Review

On Saturday, we went out to the Washington County Fairgrounds in Hillsboro, OR to the Home Orchard Society’s Fruit Propagation Fair and Scion Exchange to pick up my pre-ordered custom apple trees. Since apple trees do not resemble their parents when grown from seed (find link), so cuttings are taken and grafted onto root stock. This is what I picked up.

The scion exchange was a huge part of this fair. When people were recently pruning their trees, they cut of the scions needed to make custom grafts. There where hundreds of buckets there full of these scion cuttings for people to take and graft onto new rootstock. It was quite impressive how many scion varieties they had.

As we were leaving, we saw a man carrying a bucket full of scions! I had to ask how many acres he had, to which he said 45. I asked how many scions he got, and he said enough to be playing with sticks for awhile. However, since the scions were free, and he would be paying only a small fee for rootstock, he was probably paying no more than one quarter of the price of what it would cost to buy trees from a nursery. Granted, he has to do a lot of work grafting, but that is a lot of savings for 45 acres.