Tips on Cutting & Storing Scions:    (Hints for Everyone) 

1. Look around your garden.  What do you have (that is dormant) that could be pruned to yield scions for grafting, budding, or rooting?  What could you bring to the Exchange as bareroot plants?

2. Cut scions and dig plants as close to the Exchange date as possible, while the donor plant is still dormant but BEFORE the buds begin to swell.  (Some of your prunings may be too old and hard to be useful, while others may be too young and tender.  A book like Sunset Pruning and Grafting can help you decide what to keep and what to discard for any given species.  Or bring the prunings to the Exchange and ask for help.)

3. Carefully remove leaves and leaf litter from your plant materials. Light Brown Apple Moth (a new plant pest with many hosts) hides in both living and dead leaves. For evergreen scions (i.e., citrus), trim off the leaf blade but leave the petiole attached to the scion.

3. Cut each scion 4 to 8" long.  Aim to have at least 4 buds on each piece.  Cut the bottom of each piece square and the top end at a diagonal so others can tell which end is up.

4. Label your scions and store them in plastic bags to prevent drying.  Or you can dip both ends of each piece in melted paraffin.  Keep roots of bareroot plants in damp sawdust or damp, leaf-free, dirt.

5. Store scions in the refrigerator (NOT IN THE FREEZER), a COLD basement, or buried in the ground.

6. Before coming to the Exchange, place all the scions of one kind together in a plastic bag,  preferably a 1-gal ZIPLOC bag to preclude the bother of twist-ties. Label each bag.