Sunday 22 March 2015

Where did the time go?

It can be hard sometimes, this blogging business.  Not finding stuff to tell you about, but just trying to keep up with posting all the stuff we have been doing!  Sometimes the best thing to do is to connect the phones and various cameras to the laptop, scroll through the photos, upload the best, hoping to string a narrative together from whatever comes up.

Which is precisely what I am going to do now...

In February we had Chinese New Year at the house in Geeveston, and invited a few people round to join us and Coreen's family for a bit of a meal.  And as anyone who has been to a Chinese New Year celebration knows, a bit of a meal is one hell of a feast!  We put one of our pigs on the spit, and the taste of it was absolutely sensational, completely unadorned by spices or herbs.  Three of our aunties were here, along with Cor's parents, and we had an amazing time.

People start to come out to see the pig

Yours truly plus the trained chef (and Zak) keep a close eye on proceedings
 
Time for everyone to get in and toss the yee sang salad for long life and a prosperous year!

Julian loved having his family here, he was really lost when they left!

Loves Aunty Kim

Aunty Bee giving Julian some advice over lunch at Peppermint Bay

Aunties See, Bee and Kim with the lad
So we got organised, put a caravan on the farm (before the house is even finished), organised the shower and toilet, and got some WWOOFers.  Fumi, Justin and Dan were the first, followed shortly by Cosmos.  We have been able to achieve so much with their help.  The lads helped with orchard work and the animals, while Cosmos has been helping Coreen paint the inside of the farm house.  It has been great!
 

Matt showing Justin, Fumi and Dan how to tag the sheep before separating the new ones

Cosmos and Fumi help us release the seven new Muscovies we have been looking after at the house in Geeveston

A normal week night and a neighbour drops round with an Atlantic salmon that he gets for free from his job at the fish farm.  Sushi on the menu!

We went to the launch of Nick, Ross and Matthew's new book in Hobart, catering done by our good mates Kelly and Cassy

Another clutch of Muscovy ducklings, this time 11 hatched!

He's a Wee Willie Smiths lad for sure.  A great day at the Taste of the Huon.


Sunday 15 March 2015

The Crossroads

We have been at a crossroads about our apples.  In one direction, we were looking at continuing to grow apples as a commercial venture.  In the other, we remove the rest of the orchard, keeping a bit for ourselves, walk away from the idea that we could make a go of the apple game, and focus on livestock.

For a couple of pretty positive and optimistic people, it took a lot to bring us to this point, but three months of dreading the rain because of the disease pressures it would bring did a lot of the driving.  I spent over a dozen 13-hour days on the tractor spraying in this period, though not a single one of these days passed without a breakdown, either of my sprayer or my tractor.  These breakdowns added to our stress, as the organic orchard is unforgiving when it comes to timing of sprays.

We thought about just going over to spray free, but an unhealthy monoculture is still a monoculture, and black spot will deform your fruit, reduce how much you grow, and damage the health of the trees, not to mention the effects of codling moth, wooly aphid, and powdery mildew.

The Christmas period gave us a good opportunity to step back and weigh all these things up, and for now we have decided to continue to grow apples commercially.  But for this to happen, a few things need to change.  Firstly we need to remove more of the orchard.  We have decided that we want to care for 9 hectares of apples, and do the best that is possible with just the two of us, not look after 12 hectares while doing a bad job of it because we are overextended.  So reducing the amount of orchard we have retained is an important part of this.  We may go further, but this is where it will be for now.

The other thing that needed to change was our equipment.  Breakdowns are going to happen, but they will happen more often with gear that is 20 years old that has been poorly maintained (if at all).  And the simple fact is the organic orchard doesn’t forgive delays, for any reason.  So we bit the bullet and invested in new equipment, specifically a new tractor and a new sprayer.  The tractor will change my work environment for the better (especially in the rain and during the hayfever season), and the new sprayer will reduce the amount of time we spend filling by a third, a time saving of about one and a half hours every day we spray.  Plus, they should all but eliminate breakdowns.  And we always have the old tractor and sprayer there as backup there as well.  I hesitated a bit writing this post, as people can be a bit weird when you buy new gear, a bit of that green-eyed monster that lives in small towns I guess.  But we have it, there's no point denying it, so we may as well move on with our farming.


It was a big investment, one that we hope pays dividends in our apple futures.  But before we can think about our apple futures we still have to deal with our apples present.  This season’s harvest will start in earnest in about two weeks.  I hope we can cope, we picked virtually no bins last year, and should be doing over 500 this year!  Well, there is only one way to find out… stay tuned.

It is a Landini, an 85 horsepower orchard tractor

Hopefully it will be the boy's someday

For him to have an apple future, we had to do it!