beautiful fruit leads to beautiful preserves which we will enjoy in the winter months

I am not sure what I have told you before as I have been working very long days. It would seem to me in my very fuzzled state that all the fruit has ripened almost simultaneously.

With the very hot winds we have been experiencing last week that is not surprising. These winds were coming from straight across the desert of mainland Australia. In their wake they have been causing havoc to our communities with bushfires all over the State. Our nearest town to the south Bicheno copped it particularly badly with many houses destroyed. All very reminiscent of the bush fires we experienced in Scamander in 2006.

But getting back to our fruit season it was almost impossible to keep the water up to the trees and much of our fruit either dropped off as it got cooked or if less ripe became scalded by the heat. I would say we would have been lucky to have harvested 25% of the good fruit as the rest dropped or broke down after harvesting.

Since I am into confessions I should also mentioned that my spray regime wasn’t up to scratch and we had a lot of brownrot in the apricots especially. I put that down mainly to the fact that the spray unit wasn’t working properly and not enough fungicide was getting to the trucks of the trees in the dormant period. We are now looking at repairing  or replacing this spray unit. The other issue we had was very unusual spring weather with hot days and cold nights which properly was largely the result of the extremely dry spring.

So now we are almost finished picking the apricots, the blackcurrants and red currants have also been picked. The raspberries picks area also rapidly diminishing with only the reliable strawberries still ticking along. We have had an excellent team this year, very keen workers from a variety of countries.

Just a few photos taken recently:

Eva and Louisa celebrating their visit to Eureka Farm

Strawberry twins- doesn’t happen often