another delicious season

The pen has been rather idle of late and for this I apologise  Sometimes I find it hard to feel strongly about what it is I want to say. At these times I feel it is best to get on with doing your job and probably getting into shape some of the things that were bothering me. But now the need to say hello to the world again has grown stronger. Thank goodness for that as I enjoy it.

The season is at an end. The last of the strawberries were picked today by our intrepid Irish picker Michelle  and as winter

Prawan and Michelle

approaches and frosty nights are upon us it is time to reflect on the season. It is only now that one can really gather together a composite picture as to what has happened. To this end one usually asks how well did it go and what one would like to see done differently next year.

It has been an unusually hot summer. There has been little rain ever since I returned from Kashmir in August last year. So this meant we were irrigating all summer. So much so that towards the end of summer and in particular after the fruit had been picked I reduced the water irrigation rates to those blocks.. My concern was that if the drought extended into another year we might empty our dam and thus run out of water. You see we just don’t need rain to replenish our dam but significant rain say more than 100mm at any given time so that the creeks and watercourses start flowing.

Blue skies every day without a potential raincloud around. This is the perfect weather for tourists even though they too didn’t seem to be here in the same numbers as other years. My guess is that the resulting bushfires which raged the whole of Tasmania was a major deterrent  Those who have been following my blog will know that in 2006 a major bushfire swept past our farm. Our building were not damaged but must of our production areas were destroyed. Whilst conditions were favourable for a repeat of those circumstances we were fortunate that Scamander didn’t have a bushfire. Our neighbours in Bicheno were not so lucky and further south at the start of the Port Arthur peninsula Dunnally was destroyed. One should note that no where have settlements done much to reduce the risk of these fires and that anywhere on the east coast including Scamander a repeat of the 2006 bushfires could have occurred.

Back at the farm we noticed that surprisingly reducing the water for some trees seemed to benefit them. For example for many years I have been trying to grow lemons on our top paddock which weather wise should be the best place to have them. (Eureka lemons is one such lemon and one of the reasons for the name of this farm) But the soil (should I say soil?) is very sandy and we just couldn’t get them to grow. We tried extensive mulching and composting to improve the soil, we checked the soil and leaves to determine what deficiencies we might have as a way of explaining the situation. And I guess in the end I must admit I had given up on them and to the extent that I had disconnected the irrigation. Low and behold many of the trees which had suffered extreme die back seem to be re-sprouting. My assumption is that lemons, peaches and nectarines don’t really appreciate being water in the root zone which is where the drippers had been placed. (this may be a too simplified view and could still be related to low pH conditions leading to manganese toxicity)

So that observation means that some of these trees will escape the chainsaw exit. I will instead move the drippers some distance away so that instead of bringing the water to the  trunk area it will now be up to the plants to extend their root area as much as they want to capture this water supply.

This year we also experienced a lot of brown rot in our stonefruit. We have always had this problem with nectarines and peaches particularly in our lower orchards near the house which are prone to damper conditions. This year however I hadn’t realised that my spray unit wasn’t working as well as it should have done. So much so that even the apricots in the top paddock had a lot of brown rot in them. In this area where there is good air circulation I hadn’t experienced this so much before. So this year I am now in the process of pruning and spraying. I am also removing much more of the crossovers etc so that the tree has a much more linear orientation which was the original parmette plan. Two reasons the first as just described to make the resulting tree more able to be wetted by the sprays and also from a practicable point to reduce the amount of fruit and hopefully the amount of thinning.  I am also hoping to make the rows more accessible to vehicles so that we can pick straight into lugs and put them on a local vehicle rather than have to carry them some distance.

To help me prune I bought 2 long handled secateurs from Amazon. Their Prime items can be delivered very cheaply to Australia. From my point of view I had a lot more choice than seems to be available in Australia. Our Rural suppliers seem to be removing themselves from Horticultural activities. When we arrived 20 years (or more) horticultural activities was a much bigger part of their business and the Tasmanian government also helped in many ways to identify issues. As I am not using much labour this year it was important that I had better gear. To that extent I have just purchased a pruning chainsaw from Bunnings. It is an Ozito 23cc costing $99. So far except for a carbie problem seems to be doing the job very well.

We are not getting any younger as you may have gathered by photos past and more recent. So as fast as we try to reduce our workload we often start up something else that we feel is interesting. This year for example we have netted the cherries in our paddock up for our buildings and also the blueberries in our front paddock. Hopefully we expect to get some financial benefits in the coming years. The blueberries did in fact give a small crop this year and without the netting I am sure we would not have got any. On the other hand we intend to remove some rows of fruit which have either been unproductive or non-commercial. It is always a balancing act as some fruits seem to be in demand one year and  not the next. Some fruits also don’t grow so well because we still don’t know what they need whether it be the right pollinator or some nutrient(s) which they are lacking. So this year we intend to remove or in some cases heavily prune the trees so that production is very limited.